Robert Doisneau – Time rediscovered

The Yves Brayer Museum presents an anthology of 50 iconic photographs of passers-by, ordinary people and celebrities, offering visitors an excellent introduction to Doisneau’s captivating work.

Photographer Robert Doisneau was born in 1912 in the Paris suburb of Gentilly and died in 1994 in Montrouge. He was part of the twentieth-century humanist photography movement.

Robert Doisneau took his first photographs in 1929. In 1931, he began working for André Vigneau’s studio, where he had the opportunity to publish his first reports. After France was liberated at the end of World War II, he published regularly in magazines such as Life, Point-de-Vue, Regards and Picture Post.

His work demonstrates his keen sense of observation. It offers us a nostalgic glimpse of life in Paris and its suburbs in times gone by, viewed with humour, irony and tenderness. Doisneau remains one of the twentieth century’s best-known photographers.

“I was trying to present a world that I would have been comfortable in, where people were pleasant and where I would find the tenderness that I would like to feel. My photos were a kind of proof that this world could exist.” (Interview with Frank Horvat, “Entre Vues”, 1990).