Robert Doisneau, beyond the kiss photo in front of Paris City Hall

The largest exhibition in two decades on French photographer Robert Doisneau has opened in Paris , showcasing an artist whose colossal oeuvre – comprising some 450,000 images – goes far beyond the iconic photo of the kiss in front of Paris City Hall, taken in 1950 for Life magazine.

"This exhibition is very different because the fact that he is so well-known has led to him being caricatured, which means we always see the same photos of him ," explained one of the photographer's daughters, Francine Deroudille, who, along with her sister Annette Doisneau, has been involved in the selection of works that can be seen until October 12 at the Musée Maillol.

"We've pigeonholed him as a sentimental Parisian photographer , taking smiling photos of children and things like that," Deroudille explains. But Doisneau, born in Gentilly in 1912 and died in Montrouge in 1994, was that "and many other things as well."

The exhibition, titled Robert Doisneau. Instants donnés and curated by Isabelle Benoit with the photographer's daughters, makes a statement from its poster: instead of choosing one of the most recognizable images of his career, Maillol opted for "The Jump" (1936), a photograph of a child perched on a ruined wall that had only been published once before.

The snapshot nevertheless illustrates several of the most recognizable elements of Doisneau's vision : his interest in childhood, his humanistic approach, and his playful, realistic, and poetic approach.

The exhibition, comprising some 400 photographs , also explores his career as a portraitist and the parade before his lens of illustrious figures such as Pablo Picasso (in the famous photo in which giant loaves of bread are mistaken for his hands), Orson Welles and Marguerite Duras.

Less well-known are the works in the sections dedicated to his on-demand work , such as his time at Vogue magazine, the Rapho agency, or his advertising photographs, such as the one he took for an advertisement for the Orangina soft drink.

"Every time I received a commission, I tried to look at it a little obliquely, so I could go off on a tangent toward what I wanted to show," his daughter explained about these chapters of his career.

But the great rediscovery of this exhibition is, above all, the more social photographs that Doisneau took in steel mills and mines , where men with amputated fingers and children covered in coal worked, as well as his photos of prostitutes and street people in the suburbs of Paris.

"You're going to see a whole aspect of hard, dark social photography that we don't really expect from him," Deroudille said.

Doisneau, on a personal level, was actually very similar to his more entertaining photographs: someone very discreet but with a great sense of humor , always looking for the fun things in life, according to his daughter.

" He was extremely modest ," Deroudille recalled, "he never showed the immodest things in life, and he was extremely sensitive, although at the same time he could have quite a radical attitude. If he didn't like someone, for example, he didn't confront them, but he would leave."

He never sought to be a professor or a theorist, Deroudille said, which is why it always grated on her that he, like other of her colleagues, was labeled a humanist.

But now, at a time when humanism "is not at its best," he acknowledged that the term fits well with his father's almost sociological outlook.

In any case, the exhibition seeks to connect Doisneau's work with new audiences and explore it beyond "The Kiss," which closes the exhibition at the Maillol, presented as a hanging installation.

"It should have had a different status," explained curator Isabelle Benoit about the photo, which, although one of the most famous images in history, was not without controversy, as the author himself acknowledged years later, amid legal disputes with a married couple who claimed to be the couple in the picture, that it was a posed photo and not a spontaneous scene.

But none of this prevents it, according to Benoit, from remaining part of our imagination and, even in the 21st century, from periodically appearing as a symbol of hope and humanity, as happened in France after the 2015 attacks or during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the image modified to include masks.