Wednesday, October 20, 2021

Le Baiser de l'Hôtel de Ville (1950)


Doisneau's famous picture, cropped. If Doisneau were alive, would he have allowed it -- the focus on what our eyes are drawn to anyway: the kiss? the kissers? Doisneau might not have been the kind of photographer who minds if his work is cropped, or has text laid over it, if it means selling more books.

No one pays attention to the kissers, and this gives the kissers an invisibility that makes them timeless, their passion eternal. That's one explanation. Another has it that those surrounding the kissers are too preoccupied with their own postwar lives to care, and if two people appear to stop in the street to kiss like that, then the country is healing. Indeed, from kisses like this come children, some of whom might have stood on that very spot eighteen years later, not with kisses but with fists, pictures.

photo: Bruno Barbey

No comments:

Post a Comment