ROBERT DOISNEAU GOOGLE DOODLE: French street photographer’s playful brilliance celebrated in birthday logo



“The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.”
— Robert Doisneau
TOTING HIS TRUSTY CAMERA through the avenues of Paris, viewing the world through the lyrical eye of his Leica, Robert Doisneau gave us thousands of frozen moments of wit and whimsy, innocence and romance. And more often than not, playful story-pictures kissed with poetry.
Today, on its search home-page, Google celebrates the centenary of the popular French photographer with a Doodle that reflects all those aspects of the artist.
There, on the far-right in this photographic quartet, is Doisneau’s most iconic image, “Kiss by the Hotel de Ville (Le baiser de l’hotel de ville),” the stirring liplock that appeared in Life magazine in 1950, featuring a couple of aspiring 20something actors (who would, according to lore, part ways less than a year later).
The image was staged. The romance was real. And the moment’s artistic heat burns still.
“I don't photograph life as it is,” Doisneau famously said, “but life as I would like it to be.”
(Real life, of course, could prove harsher: The woman in the image, Françoise Bornet [nee Delbart], sued Doisneau in 1993 for compensation and royalties; the case was dismissed. The artist died the following year.)
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Doisneau so frequently found art, though, in the pure and unposed physical exuberance of children at play. Google reflects that by choosing his 1943 photo (at far left in the logo) shot near the Eiffel Tower, titled “Tug on the Champ de Mars (Le remorqueur du Champ de Mars).”
The Doodle is topped by the striking 1971 image “Three little white children, Parc Monceau (Trois petits enfants blancs, parc Monceau),” in which the trio of white-clad kids pass the Parisian monument to writer Guy de Maupassant. And Google — such a fan of Street Views — completes its thoughtful logo curation with 1977’s sad-sweet “Dog on Wheels (Le chien a roulettes).”
“I am not a hunter of pictures,” Doisneau once said. “I am a fisher of pictures.”

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