The monumental Château de Malbrouck, a historic castle built in 1419 by Arnold Vi, Seigneur of Sierck, is for the first time dedicating its entire exhibition space to photography. Dominique Laudien, castle director and exhibition curator, selected Robert Doisneau’s work to inaugurate this initiative with a retrospective that will run through August 28, 2011. Assisted by the photographer’s daughters, Annette Doisneau and Francine Deroudille, Laudien selected more than 300 prints including several revelations from a commission from “La Vie Ouvrière” about the Lorraine valley mining towns. Inspired by the elaborate exhibition space, Laurence Fontaine’s scenography is at times monumental. To make their selection, the historians and curators had access to the immense “Atelier Robert Doisneau” in the photographer’s former home, where over 450,000 negatives are conserved in controlled temperature rooms. In the catalogue preface, art historian Patrick Absalon provides both chronological and thematic keys to observing the exhibition.

Born on April 14, 1912, Doisneau’s earliest works on display date back to the late 20’s. They are particularly playful pictures of children in the suburbs that would remain a constant subject throughout his photographic career, if only for criticizing, without nostalgia, the destructive transformations responsible for eradicating the poetic soul. He would once again cover the suburbs, this time in color, for a commission in 1984 from the DATAR (Délégation à l’Aménagement du Territoire et à l’Action Régionale). Designed to document suburban landscapes and architecture, the human aspect was, contrary to Doisneau’s style, nearly absent. It was a sign. The war and post-war years would follow, provoking some of his most memorable images. Admittedly iconic, it would become obvious that the essence of his work was elsewhere, more poetic, intimate, and less accessible. Further on, a section devoted to what he would consider necessary to “feed his family and cover vacation costs.” He became the official photographer for “Vogue” from 1949 to 1951, immortalizing major and minor anecdotes of “Parisian Life”. It was at this time that he would take his series of portraits of fashion and arts celebrities.

Another world, if one remembers that from 1934 to 1939 he worked in the advertising department at Renault, before being fired for … “repeatedly arriving late”! His return to Rapho, run by Raymond Grosset, in 1946, led to work at several magazines that commissioned stories focused on the human aspect he so cherished. He showed men at work, men fighting, but also life’s major and minor joys. It was in this context that he began photographing the great strikes of the Lorraine iron miners who, in the 1960’s, predicted the changes that would ravage the region two decades later. During these same years, Robert Doisneau would also be asked to photograph the “billionaires” of Palm Springs for “Fortune” magazine. A coincidence, because this trip was provoked by his friend Maurice Baquet who, during his year traveling throughout the United States, sent Doisneau a plane ticket so he could discover the country. After hesitating, he accepted under one condition, that he could also work to feed his family. This forgotten reportage was rediscovered by “Fortune” picture editor Scott Thode who gave it to Doisneau’s daughters during the 2007 Visa Pour l’Image Festival in Perpignan. This series has since become a book and has been displayed only rarely but will be on exhibit at the Château de Malbrouck.

After the sections focused on the photographer’s commissioned work, the remaining pictures on display explore his haphazard meetings, a sort of “peeping tom” who, according to Patrick Absalon, had the “eye of a poet, but also of a journalist”.

Above and beyond their physical reality, his pictures have a timeless dimension with a gentle and generous point of view for his subjects and their environment.

The exhibition is accompanied by a trilingual catalogue published by Serge Domini books with texts by Patrick Absalon (Art Historian), Laure Boyer (Photography Historian), Francine Deroudille and Annette Doisneau (Atelier Robert Doisneau), Peter Hamilton (writer), and Philippe Hoch (chief curator).

Bernard Perrine
Correspondant de l’Institut de France
Bernard.Perrine 1@orange.fr

Robert Doisneau
Until August 28
Château de Malbrouck – Manderen
Site du Conseil Général de Moselle
57480 Manderen