Robert Doisneau
Robert Doisneau
Robert Doisneau was a French photographer. In the 1930s he used a Leica on the streets of Paris. He was a champion of humanist photography and with Henri Cartier-Bresson a pioneer of photojournalism. He is renowned for his 1950 image Le baiser de l'hôtel de ville, a photograph of a couple kissing in the busy streets of Paris. Doisneau was appointed a Chevalierof the Legion of Honour in 1984...
add hundredth perhaps second three
A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there - even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity.
photography laughing people
When people talk to me about picture hunters, I very quietly laugh. I'm not a hunter of pictures, I'm a fisher of pictures.
education
To suggest is to create; to describe is to destroy.
hate i-hate collectors
I hate collectors, the ones who take something just for themselves.
winning youth ends
To freeze time, to hold on to youth, this business makes no sense. It's always time that wins in the end.
animal technique photographer
The photographer must be absorbent - like a blotter, allow himself to be permeated by the poetic moment... His technique should be like an animal function... he should act automatically.
memories two perfect
Some days the mere fact of seeing feels like perfect happiness... You feel so rich you long to share your jubilation with others. The memory of such moments is my most precious possession. Maybe because there've been so few of them. A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there-- even if you put them end to end they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds snatched from eternity.
imagination people sophisticated
Nowadays people's visual imagination is so much more sophisticated, so much more developed, particularly in young people, that now you can make an image which just slightly suggests something, they can make of it what they will.
finishing-it giving advice
I don't usually give out advice or recipes, but you must let the person looking at the photograph go some of the way to finishing it. You should offer them a seed that will grow and open up their minds.
years get-better firsts
For a photographer, the first 70 years are a bit difficult, but after that things get better.
ideas lines hunters
You know, they always say that the photographer is a hunter of images. That is a flattering image, the idea of a hunter, it's virile, acquired power. Actually though, it isn't that. We are really fishermen with hooks and lines.
girl memories home
A memory from my youth comes back to me. You go into the woods on a bike, with a girl. There is the smell of heather, you can hear the wind in the fir trees, you don't dare tell her about your love, but you feel happy, as if you were floating above the ground. Then you look at the clouds beyond the trees and they are fleeting. And you know that within an hour you'll have to go home, that tomorrow will be a working day. You wish you could stop that moment forever, but you can't, it is bound to end. So you take a photo, as if to challenge time.