Robert Doisneau

I have a few of his books. I was looking at ........ 3 Seconds From Eternity.
It really strikes that a lot of his (and many other photographers) pics were of "immediate" post-war Paris and France. Sort of that 1945-1949 period. I am sure there was all kinds of rubble, desperation, struggle and strife to show, but the 20 or so photos i saw were of weddings, bike races, cafe and nightlife, kids playing, etc etc.
When you think that just a few short years earlier they were occupied by The Wehrmacht and Gestapo, it is amazing how "normal" things seem.
Then again, maybe not so "amazing".
I can imagine how anxious people would have been to have joy and happiness again and get back to life and love.

HCB earlier quote about Adams and Weston never rang more true

Editing history through a narrative of images is very powerful, even though not a representative of the real world which it is depicting

CMoore said:

It really strikes that a lot of his (and many other photographers) pics were of "immediate" post-war Paris and France. Sort of that 1945-1949 period. I am sure there was all kinds of rubble, desperation, struggle and strife to show, but the 20 or so photos i saw were of weddings, bike races, cafe and nightlife, kids playing, etc etc.
When you think that just a few short years earlier they were occupied by The Wehrmacht and Gestapo, it is amazing how "normal" things seem.

Click to expand...

It takes decades if not centuries to rebuild after war. When I was a teenager in London in the mid to late 1960s, there were still many rubble-filled bomb sites all over the City of London. There was a company making a fortune by using them as car-parks, and even a book about the bird life that colonised them before anyone could afford to rebuild. I was getting interested in photography in those years, and this shot of a City bomb site is one of my earliest photos (taken mainly because it could move or run away!)

As you point out, Doisneau (or his intended audience) emphasised the positive, cheerful and forward looking, but for me as part of the next generation, the slowness of Britain's recreation was pretty poignant. Wish I had taken more on that theme.

CMoore said:

I am sure there was all kinds of rubble, desperation, struggle and strife to show

Click to expand...

As far as rubble is concerned, there wasn't much, relatively speaking. You have to remember that France declared war to Germany in September 1939, and Paris was under French occupation less than a year later (June 1940). Very little of France was destroyed in the early years of the war, and few cities were destroyed during the entirety of the conflict, and those that were, such as Caen or Le Havre, were located in the north or north-west, and that only happened during the Allied invasion. Compared to the 1914-1918 war, the second world war was much less destructive for France.

As far as Paris was concerned, there was already a sense of normalcy —if you weren't Jewish, of course — during the occupation. Paris was occupied — meaning it's where Germans lived — and half of France was under the Vichy government, which was allied with the Germans. From 1940 to 1945, half of France was no longer at war with Germany, and the idea was to make that part of France Franco-German, as Alsace and Lorraine once had been. These people wanted food, they wanted wine, they wanted music, they wanted entertainment (movies, cabarets, etc.). As far as food was concerned, there was rationing, partly overcomed by the black market. Not to say life wasn't hard, but for many people in Paris and elsewhere in France, there were still weddings, bike races, cafes and nightlife, kids playing, etc.

The situation in England, and in London in particular, was totally different. There you had rubble, desperation, struggle and strife, as you had in Italy because of Mussolini and Spain because of Franco. Not to say the French had it easy, but I'm not surprised that photography, during and after, reflected a different reality than elsewhere.

Alex Benjamin said:

As far as rubble is concerned, there wasn't much, relatively speaking. You have to remember that France declared war to Germany in September 1939, and Paris was under French occupation less than a year later (June 1940). Very little of France was destroyed in the early years of the war, and few cities were destroyed during the entirety of the conflict, and those that were, such as Caen or Le Havre, were located in the north or north-west, and that only happened during the Allied invasion. Compared to the 1914-1918 war, the second world war was much less destructive for France.

As far as Paris was concerned, there was already a sense of normalcy —if you weren't Jewish, of course — during the occupation. Paris was occupied — meaning it's where Germans lived — and half of France was under the Vichy government, which was allied with the Germans. From 1940 to 1945, half of France was no longer at war with Germany, and the idea was to make that part of France Franco-German, as Alsace and Lorraine once had been. These people wanted food, they wanted wine, they wanted music, they wanted entertainment (movies, cabarets, etc.). As far as food was concerned, there was rationing, partly overcomed by the black market. Not to say life wasn't hard, but for many people in Paris and elsewhere in France, there were still weddings, bike races, cafes and nightlife, kids playing, etc.

The situation in England, and in London in particular, was totally different. There you had rubble, desperation, struggle and strife, as you had in Italy because of Mussolini and Spain because of Franco. Not to say the French had it easy, but I'm not surprised that photography, during and after, reflected a different reality than elsewhere.

Click to expand...

Regards "rubble"..... yes i was referring to Normandy and other battle zones, not Paris.
It was probably "The Falaise Gap" before The Allies stared killing more German soldiers than French civilians.
Paris was "lucky", it became home for the occupying army.
The battle scars of Paris were much more cerebral than physical.
Paris also got lucky with General Choltitz. Somebody else might have obeyed orders and burned Paris down to the ground.
We can all be thankful we did not live through the horrors of WW2.
Dark days for sure.

I think the point is, a photograph is only that, a moment in time., many photographs arranged together is a narrative, and then of course “ what photographers choose to shoot or disregard. In between all of that is politics.

I still think one of the most powerful image of war-time France was taken immediately after the war: Cartier-Bresson's photograph of a women recognizing and accusing a Gestapo informant who had tried to hide in the crowd.

Alex Benjamin said:

I still think one of the most powerful image of war-time France was taken immediately after the war: Cartier-Bresson's photograph of a women recognizing and accusing a Gestapo informant who had tried to hide in the crowd.

Click to expand...

I read somewhere that this was actually a still from a film that HCB directed. If true, it’s one way to capture the decisive moment.

greg zinselmeier said:

I think the point is, a photograph is only that, a moment in time., many photographs arranged together is a narrative, and then of course “ what photographers choose to shoot or disregard. In between all of that is politics.

Click to expand...

In some subject areas, photography is unavoidably politics, don’t you think?

snusmumriken said:

I read somewhere that this was actually a still from a film that HCB directed. If true, it’s one way to capture the decisive moment.

Click to expand...

Not a movie still. He was directing a documentary in Dessau, Germany, about the prisonniers of war being sent back home. While the camera was rolling — he wasn't operating it — he was watching the people there, Leica in hand. That's when he saw the woman on the right, filled with anger, screaming at the other and lifting her arm to slap her. So he shot the scene with his Leica.

You can watch the excerpt of the movie in which this scene happens here:


Position is almost the same—Cartier-Bresson was obviously near the camera but not directly behind it—but the format isn't. The photograph is clearly 35mm.

[EDIT] : he wasn't directing the film but was technical consultant.

Alex Benjamin said:

Not a movie still. He was directing a documentary in Dessau, Germany, about the prisonniers of war being sent back home. While the camera was rolling — he wasn't operating it — he was watching the people there, Leica in hand. That's when he saw the woman on the right, filled with anger, screaming at the other and lifting her arm to slap her. So he shot the scene with his Leica.

You can watch the excerpt of the movie in which this scene happens here:

Décryptage : dans l'oeil de Cartier-Bresson, la violence de la Libération

C’est une photo emblématique de l’œuvre d’Henri Cartier Bresson. Un cliché pris en juin 1945 dans un camp de transit en Allemagne où une rescapée reconnaît sa délatrice et la gifle. France 2 vous dit ce qui se cache derrière l’image.

www.francetvinfo.fr

Position is almost the same—Cartier-Bresson was obviously near the camera but not directly behind it—but the format isn't. The photograph is clearly 35mm.

[EDIT] : he wasn't directing the film but was technical consultant.

Click to expand...

Excellent, thanks for that.

CMoore said:

Paris was "lucky", it became home for the occupying army.
The battle scars of Paris were much more cerebral than physical.

Click to expand...

ok... a bit of details, like an intro...

Paris had not much "cerebral" scars. It was the place with the biggest amount of pro-German elites. There were no uprisings in the four years of occupation. In 1944-45 lot of high and mid-class people were buying themselves a partisan past. For many the "cerebral scars" were to get rid of the past.

Do you know the anecdote about Paris liberation? The french liberation army put together in UK as a part of the American landing in Normandie, had no initiative of its own, Eisenhower and Bradley wanted to rush to Berlin, so there was no point to divert troops and time to Paris and USA had planned to run France itself, through a then called AMGOT (Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories). France was meant in Washington, to become an American protectorate.
De Gaulle was strongly opposed to this of course, so in one hand he insisted by Eisenhower, stressing advantages of freeing the capital, on the other hand he triggered what were in Paris of partisan groups able to launch actions against German troops. The last-minute uprising was then providing a ground for a domestic home-made fight for sovereignty. Without this USA had claimed take-over because lack of local head, like they did some time after in Germany.
Just after the landing in Normandie, Americans were spreading AMGOT banknotes in order to set the root of an economic control, De Gaulle went against by declaring these banknotes illegal....

So, Paris: the french 2è DB (Division Blindée) under the command of Leclerc was directed to Paris, and the scout company was a 9th of an African french regiment made up mostly of Spanish republicans who were veterans of Spanish Civil War and flew to French Africa after Franco's victory. That "Nine" was the first to fight its way through and enter into Paris.
The joke is that the first "French" soldier who was meet by a local Parisian did speak broken french and his words were "sorry, I am not French, but Spaniard". And the officer who was photographed inside Paris Town Hall with the local leader of Gaullists, published 25.08.1944 in freshly founded paper "Libération", was Amado Granell Mesado but it writes: "Le premier soldat américain a pénétré dans la capitale ...." :




there's some literature about "la Nueve" or "la Novena" (company.). Search the web with keyword "la nueve" in spanish....
This Amado Granell was the right-hand of the french officer, Raymond Dronne, who lead the 9th company, all the soldiers, sergeants, where Spaniards. Sometime after, "real" Frenchs, then some Americans, entered the city.

a current official Paris Town Hall page about this:
La « Nueve », ces républicains espagnols qui ont libéré Paris !

the additional layer of fun there is that USA and UK had supported Franco in Spain, by denying help to the Republic. When Franco and Queipo de Llano made their putsch and Franco landed his Moroccan troops in mainland, the government in Madrid requested by official channels military help from France and UK. Denied. The Republic of Spain was a mix of social-democrats and regional anarchist-communist organizations where strong. This seen from Anglo-Saxon pov. meant "red" so they wanted it down. It is often written by some historians that Franco saved Spain from communism, because the Republic asked and got Soviet involvement. But this historical write-up proceeds by hiding the fact that initially the help was requested at France and UK. Being ignored, the government turned to USSR. In case of military intervention of France and UK, USSR had been cut and Franco probably defeated.
The Soviets instead of going at once into strong military action, were interested in operating first a purge of the anti-soviet leftists among Spain's, because there even communists were a local brew opposed to the Bolsheviks who didnt want to help anarchists and trotskyists in a "bourgeois socialist" government alliance.
State secretary of F. Roosevelt, Cordell Hull was a staunch anti Spain's Republic, as well as a staunch anti De Gaulle after. For instance Americans decided that Franco's army could refuel at US oil depots in Morocco, but Republican army was denied, etc. Hull made everything in order to sabotage Spanish Republic.

so "liberation" of Paris is a double layered cake of irony.
In fact among Spaniards of the French army, many were dreaming that after the victory in France, De Gaulle would use them in order to launch a military operation in Spain against Franco. De Gaulle didn´t give a toss.

----

so, back to Doisneau: he was a Parisian and all his life preferred street photography of "le petit peuple de Paris".

antonio_b said:

Paris had not much "cerebral" scars. It was the place with the biggest amount of pro-German elites. There were no uprisings in the four years of occupation. In 1944-45 lot of high and mid-class people were buying themselves a partisan past. For many the "cerebral scars" were to get rid of the past.

Click to expand...

This snippet could be misconstrued as implying that there was widespread support for German occupation and the Vichy government in Paris. I don't think that's historically accurate, and the extent to which 'elites' (definition?) were supportive as a smaller subset of the population is equally debatable at the very least. The 'no uprisings' comment is also deceptive, with the French resistance being active across the country, including in Paris. The lack of massive uprising does not automatically translate into massive support of the occupation.

It comes across a somewhat easy and lazy to (dis)qualify a city's population under exceptional circumstances from the comfortable armchair 70 years after the fact and thousands of miles away.

antonio_b said:

so, back to Doisneau

Click to expand...

Yes, please, let's do that.

If I may deviate from Doisneau just a bit more, but still staying on the topic of photography's ability to portray only a part of our complex reality....Just this week, I randomly ran into these photographs labeled "Choupinette (model at Schiaparelli) or Choup (for friends) goes to the races [means of transport in Paris under the Occupation]" (I hope the link works!). It was not what I expected and the lightheartedness and humor in the captions took me down a rabbit hole and, well, I'll let you do the same.

Daniela said:

If I may deviate from Doisneau just a bit more, but still staying on the topic of photography's ability to portray only a part of our complex reality....Just this week, I randomly ran into these photographs labeled "Choupinette (model at Schiaparelli) or Choup (for friends) goes to the races [means of transport in Paris under the Occupation]" (I hope the link works!). It was not what I expected and the lightheartedness and humor in the captions took me down a rabbit hole and, well, I'll let you do the same.

Click to expand...

Fascinating, thanks.

For comparison with Doisneau, Willy Ronis' photos show another portion of post-war reality, focussing on workers' rallies and the leisure of ordinary people.

Doisneau made his living as a working photographer, until his death in 1994. A brief biographical outline of his working life can be seen here :


He left behind 440,000+ negatives, those contain a lot of images over many decades, very similar to Willi Ronis, another long living working photographer.

I think I have seen close to a half dozen exhibits of Doisneau's prints in the past twenty years or so, all in the city I live in. Each had a distinctly different theme to it, so vast is the material available and topics covered.

At one exhibit which had as its theme Les français en vacances / The French on Vacation, there were archival prints he had himself done. This allowed me and some of my photography friends to get a close look at his work, and without a bit of shame, critique some aspects of it - "look, he didn't get the horizon straight on the sea!" - "hmmm, seems to be air bubbles at the edge of the film when he developed it". Which is to say, he came across as a fellow who took pictures on vacation like the rest of us, and ended up with some gaffs, as we all do. The impression it left me with is that Doisneau was very personable, and put people at ease, which paved the way for the acceptance of his presence and his cameras.

He is still a well known, greatly loved and appreciated photographer here in France. His choices of subject matter are close to the interests of people in their everyday lives - vacation, family, cycling, etc. As a working photographer, those were seen in newspapers and magazines, his bread and butter as it were.

An exhibition of his work is always a pleasure to see, if one comes your way.

mcfitz said:

An exhibition of his work is always a pleasure to see, if one comes your way.

Click to expand...

Ah, if only ... I would love that.

koraks said:

This snippet could be misconstrued as implying that there was widespread support for German occupation and the Vichy government in Paris. I don't think that's historically accurate, and the extent to which 'elites' (definition?) were supportive as a smaller subset of the population is equally debatable at the very least. The 'no uprisings' comment is also deceptive, with the French resistance being active across the country, including in Paris. The lack of massive uprising does not automatically translate into massive support of the occupation.

Click to expand...

je vais faire rapide et sans ambiguités: les "élites" c'est simplement au premier lieu la classe politique, la haute administration et par effet dégoulinant le long des échelons jusqu'aux mairies, une partie des administrations locales et notamment la police.
Il y eut un vote sur la question d'accorder ou pas les pleins pouvoirs à Pétain, en juillet 1940 et les deux chambres votèrent massivement pour, il y seulement 80 (nombre facile à retenir) contre. Voilà pourquoi on parle de Collaboration.
Ensuite le gros des milieux d'affaires, des figures telles Bétencourt. Des personnalités des lettres et du spectacle, bref une partie du "tout Paris".
Il n'y eut pas de soulèvement, je ne sais pas si c'est "deceptive" ou pas, mais le fait est qu'il n'y eut pas de soulèvements.
Dans les cas de la Norvège et de la Pologne, pour ne pas passer sous le joug du vainqueur et devoir prêter alléageance sous une forme ou une autre, les gouvernements et parlements partirent en exil, en sorte que le pouvoir souverain et légitime de jure était préservé. Ce ne fut pas le cas de la France.

La Résistance armée fut très marginale au début, et se forma dans le Vercors avec pas mal d'exilés espagnols.
Paris ne connut pas le coup de feu sauf la semaine de sa libération.
Le principal propagandiste de Vichy était Philippe Henriot, orateur très populaire à Radio-Paris. Il fut assassiné et lors de ses obsèques il eut une foule considérable dans Paris, et ce, moins de deux mois avant la libération de la ville. Tous ceux là leur "scar" fut de se trouver des lettres de recommandations de bon résistant pour sauver leurs fesses. Et il y en avait.

so Parisians had very little "cerebral scar". Tout celà sont des bases élémentaires des cours d'Histoire de lycée par exemple (en tout cas lorsque j'y étais dans les années 80).

koraks said:

It comes across a somewhat easy and lazy to (dis)qualify a city's population under exceptional circumstances from the comfortable armchair 70 years after the fact and thousands of miles away.

Click to expand...

I don't see where you see (dis)qualification, there's something with the ways to use english language I guess.
The point was just to stress to OP that Paris and its population had it mostly cozy under German rule. And yes the first "liberators" were not even Frenchs.
(In fact not cities, but whole country's populations can be, and are, disqualified, I can prove it very easily but then this would run off-topic...)

koraks said:

Yes, please, let's do that.

Click to expand...

yes, Doisneau, comme je mentionnais il avait très à coeur de saisir des instants de la vie de ce qu'on désigne souvent comme "le petit peuple de Paris".
The guy was very interesting and there are interviews with him at different places, en français bien sûr. For instance in this 1975 documentary of INA (Institut National de l'Audiovisuel), around 38:00:


this one interview is a rarity:


this, in 1993:



etc

antonio_b said:

so Parisians had very little "cerebral scar".

Click to expand...

Again, an easy qualification to make from a safe distance - if only in time. There are several sides to the same story, and I'd be very hesitant to draw any conclusions as to the extent people were scarred in that period - notwithstanding your conviction and nice lecture (thanks very much). I felt (and still do - probably even more so, given the information you imply about your potential bias) your resolute statements warranted a bit of nuance, if only to take away potential misunderstandings.

Now do carry on with the discussion about Doisneau.

koraks said:

Now do carry on with the discussion about Doisneau.

Click to expand...

I find the way this thread has evolved very interesting because even with the historical digression, it still has been about Doisneau, or, in some fundamental way, about photography. The question here becomes: in a period of political, social turmoil, what, as a photographer, do you decide to show, do you decide to celebrate (providing you can photograph and show)? The answer isn't innocent at all, because there is a risk in any choice you make—the risk, amongst others, of wanting to obscure, hide, ignore or distort an important aspect of what actually happened, and that of being accused of detachment, or lack of engagement.

Brings us to the question of what is the moral duty of a photographer in such case: does it side with his/her interest and sensitivity, or must it be turn toward history? And if the latter, which history?

What was that HCB quote again, regarding Ansel Adams? "The whole world is falling apart, and he's photographing rocks" (or something like that).

Alex Benjamin said:

I find the way this thread has evolved very interesting because even with the historical digression, it still has been about Doisneau, or, in some fundamental way, about photography. The question here becomes: in a period of political, social turmoil, what, as a photographer, do you decide to show, do you decide to celebrate (providing you can photograph and show)? The answer isn't innocent at all, because there is a risk in any choice you make—the risk, amongst others, of wanting to obscure, hide, ignore or distort an important aspect of what actually happened, and that of being accused of detachment, or lack of engagement.

Brings us to the question of what is the moral duty of a photographer in such case: does it side with his/her interest and sensitivity, or must it be turn toward history? And if the latter, which history?

What was that HCB quote again, regarding Ansel Adams? "The whole world is falling apart, and he's photographing rocks" (or something like that).

Click to expand...

A photojournalist should tell the truth.

Alan Edward Klein said:

A photojournalist should tell the truth.

Click to expand...

Agreed, but which one?

Alex Benjamin said:

Agreed, but which one?

Click to expand...

As recorded on the film, not having significant items added or deleted.

Sirius Glass said:

As recorded on the film, not having significant items added or deleted.

Click to expand...

That's not what I was talking about. Keeping in mind the OP and his questions about Doisneau, as well as the posts following regarding what happened in Paris during the war, you can see that there were many "truths" at the same time. A photographer could have chosen to depict how people were suffering—physically, psychologically—, another how for many things went on more or less normally, another images of members the Résistance fighting in the streets, another of French and Germans sharing drinks in a Parisian cabaret, etc. They would have all in some way contradicted one and another, and yet still complemented one and another. All would be "truth", i.e., "This is what happened", but all so incomplete as to distort the image of what happened.

Alex Benjamin said:

That's not what I was talking about. Keeping in mind the OP and his questions about Doisneau, as well as the posts following regarding what happened in Paris during the war, you can see that there were many "truths" at the same time. A photographer could have chosen to depict how people were suffering—physically, psychologically—, another how for many things went on more or less normally, another images of members the Résistance fighting in the streets, another of French and Germans sharing drinks in a Parisian cabaret, etc. They would have all in some way contradicted one and another, and yet still complemented one and another. All would be "truth", i.e., "This is what happened", but all so incomplete as to distort the image of what happened.

Click to expand...

Agreed that the context and text supporting the photo(s) can influence their meaning. But let's start with the basic picture first. Don't add in or delete significant items, as Sirius said.