“The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.”

~ Robert Doisneau (1912-1994)

Associated initially with Paris and figures such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, street photography became recognized as a genre in its own right in the early 1930s. While there are precedents, and areas of overlap with documentary and architectural photography, street photography is unique in the way it parlays a photographer’s skill in capturing something of the mystery and aura of everyday life. The street photographer is often likened to a flâneur: someone who mingles anonymously in the crowd observing and recording the ways unsuspecting city dwellers interact with their environment.

Robert Doisneau (1912-1994) was a master of this art. One of France’s most noted photographers, whose career developed in parallel to the emergence of street photography as an art form, he initially studied engraving and lithography at the École Estienne in Paris to learn the crafts involved in the book trade but was captivated by the streets of the working class. The neighborhood of Gentilly was his most important “classroom”: it was there he learnt the joy of recording everyday French life, often in playful and humanist images that captured the oddities of human nature. Using various techniques, Doisneau played with light, shadow, and angles and skilfully experimented with movement, freezing ephemeral instances in time, thereby creating intimate poetic images of the mundane, things we often overlook in our haste to rush from here to there. In many ways, Doisneau’s art is a direct mirror of the man: shy, unassuming, and endlessly curious. In his own words,

“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.”

Selected Works of Robert Doisneau