"We'll always have Paris"

One brief, defining moment

AT first glance, it seems infectiously cinematic, evoking all the nuance and effortless style of the French New Wave. Robert Doisneau’s Le baiser de l'hôtel de ville (Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville), though, belongs not to fiction but to reality, making the June 12^th, 1950 edition of Life, and becoming one of the most celebrated photographs of the twentieth century. True, the two figures depicted, aspiring actors Françoise Delbart and Jacques Carteaud, posed for the shot, but, for all the orchestrated classicism of the image, Le baiser evinces a beguiling spontaneity, an authentic rather than mannered portrayal. Delbart and Carteaud, Doisneau’s accidental icons, also posed at the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Rivoli, Le baiser ultimately selling in 2005 for a reported €155,000, via the Paris auctioneers Artcurial Briest-Poulain-Le Fur. The Kiss is the most recognisable work of Doisneau’s career, and April will see the centenary of his birth, in Gentilly, Val-de-Marne, a commune in the southern suburbs of Paris.

A hypnotic duality of the formal and the unselfconscious, the photograph conveys the innate drama of experience without resorting to sentimental theatricality. Le baiser marries benign voyeurism with a craftsman’s precision. The scene is compelling, and, if we momentarily feel no entitlement to gaze, then our reticence is mollified by their devotion – they are as blind to their audience as we are compelled by their love. The figure behind them, a middle-aged man, seems pre-occupied, jaded, ensconced in a conservatism prescribed by responsibility and profession. His taut, lethargic demeanour is wholly at odds with that of the liberated couple. Whatever his Bourgeois affluence, his emotional austerity is similarly apparent, set against the foreground intimacy. A lady to Carteaud’s left tells a parallel story, a utilitarian servitude estranged from Doisneau’s core, indelible motif.

Doisneau in Southern France in 1975, with Hungarian-born photographer André Kertész.

To the Hotel behind them, there is an ethereal quality, an almost mythically atmospheric backdrop that seemingly twins the metaphysical and the sensory. It is both a presence and an annotation, a key character and yet peripheral. Perhaps one rationale for the photograph’s abiding appeal is that certain ironies and clichés of circumstance, emotional and material, are recorded in Doisneau’s one brief, defining moment. There is orthodoxy in The Kiss, but never quite at the expense of the miraculous or an artist’s ingenuity.

All our most affectionately-harboured social images of Paris – freedom, love, opportunity, possibility – be they associations of genuine or imagined virtue, merge here with a beautifully-realised grace. Fleetingly, all those perennial synonyms are accorded an enticing objectivity, the sublime characterised as much by its integrity as by its aesthetic. In Doisneau’s vision of Paris, that unique fusion of mystery and immediacy, the intimate and the meditative assume the most captivating, haunting salience.