France • 1912-1994
Let's Go See the Sea

While he is best known for his Parisian street scenes of schoolchildren in short trousers or a couple kissing in front of Paris Town Hall, Robert Doisneau didn’t focus solely on the French capital. He also cast his curious and poetic eye along the French coast, from Brittany to the Côte d’Azur, via Normandy, the Vendée, the Basque country and Languedoc. He travelled on reportage assignments, advertising commissions and family holidays.

A self-proclaimed « rebel of the marvellous », Robert Doisneau set about capturing this coastal world. Fishermen, dockers, holidaymakers and Sunday sailors: all became protagonists in the human comedy that is always present in Doisneau’s work. Whether on Parisian cobblestones or Breton jetties, what interested him was people, and his inspiration always had a spark of joy. The rest is just the setting for his work. 

His first seaside images, taken in as early as the 1930s, have just as much of that « Doisnesque » quality as his better-known photographs. We see his wife Pierrette as a tiny silhouette on a sandy beach. This work predates more social scenes, such as sardine fishermen returning to port, children collecting shells, or onlookers on a promenade - all of which retain that signature sense of « humanist photography ». His daughters Annette Doisneau and Francine Deroudille have brought this little-known aspect of his work back to the fore.

These photographs allow us to take another look at Robert Doisneau, and to get to know and understand him better. They are also - above all else - a reminder that, beyond the shots that made him famous, he was first and foremost a keen and invaluable witness to a bygone era with a transcendentally gentle, carefree ethos. As such, he is and will always remain one of the few essential names in 20th century French photography, both in the city and at the seaside.

JARDIN DES MARAIS

Robert Doisneau