Robert Doisneau | Retrospective

A selection of images from the Robert Doisneau Retrospective at the Château de Malbrouck in 2011.

The photographer must be absorbent–like a blotter, allow himself to be permeated by the poetic moment…. His technique should be like an animal function…he should act automatically.

-Robert Doisneau

The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.

-Robert Doisneau

Chance is the one thing you can’t buy. You have to pay for it and you have to pay for it with your life, spending a lot of time, you pay for it with time, not the wasting of time but the spending of time.

-Robert Doisneau

If I knew how to take a good photograph, I’d do it every time.

-Robert Doisneau

I like people for their weaknesses and faults. I get on well with ordinary people. We talk. We start with the weather, and little by little we get to the important things. When I photograph them it is not as if I were examining them with a magnifying class, like a cold and scientific observer. It’s very brotherly. And it’s better, isn’t it, to shed some light on those people who are never in the limelight.

-Robert Doisneau

You’ve got to struggle against the pollution of intelligence in order to become an animal with very sharp instincts – a sort of intuitive medium – so that to photograph becomes a magical act, and slowly other more suggestive images begin to appear behind the visible image, for which the photographer cannot be held responsible.

-Robert Doisneau

If you take photographs, don’t speak, don’t write, don’t analyse yourself, and don’t answer any questions.

-Robert Doisneau

A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there — even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity.

-Robert Doisneau