ROBERT DOISNEAU’S OBLIQUE REGARD
“THE MAN WHO FEELS,” said Horace Walpole in a celebrated mot, “will see life as a tragedy; the man who thinks will view it as a comedy.” We’re discouraged from analyzing comedy because rational words seem always to trail behind and to betray the spirit of the subject. If Walpole was right, though, there may be an element of calculated reason that aids a comic view, a slow process that nourishes a fast humor.
What if it’s said: “We think, therefore we must eventually laugh”? Thought can introduce us to the comic because it comprehends how often the vanities of the ego can be tripped up by the realities of the world. It’s not as if the comic insight is basically unkind but rather that it’s detached from human fate. The critical motion of comedy disengages us from our limitations and frustrations, and those of others. Once discovered, however, the actual constraints on our powers and resources are a potentially tragic finding that impels a new compassion for our lot.
One wonders how photography, a spatial art whose images are produced in a split-second, can ever attain any affective depth, comic or tragic. One would seem to need more than a glimpse of a scene, a stimulus through time, to react either way. Yet an instant can be quite enough for an opportune eye to undermine the pretensions of its subjects. Such an event might induce surprise, but a comic possibility is suggested only when surprise appears to exaggerate the silly fate or bad luck or absurd antics of the actors in a play, unknown to themselves. If there’s a disaster in such scenes, comedy insists that it be minor and temporary. For then we don’t have to forgive ourselves for enjoying the plight of our fellow beings. Comedy reveals the burlesque of our self-regard, and yet gives us the consciousness, the saving laughter, to defeat it.
Many of the people shown in the work of the French photographer Robert Doisneau act as straight men or women—that is, as mock victims in a comedy. They’re the ones to whom unfortunate things happen, but whose dignity is never ruffled. They’re never compromised nor wounded by the frequent jokes made at their expense, but they’re never fully alert to them, either. Their obtuseness can be really exquisite. Doisneau makes us laugh at it, but as we do so we also laugh at ourselves.
The mischief at work in his art is that of the humorist rather than of the satirist. A humorist can be touched by subjects and thereby flatteringhis viewers, Doisneau reveals how innocently and easily the two roles can be exchanged. His Paris relates to its citizens as a pair of companionable oldslippers fits one’s feet. People and place are utterlyrounded off and habituated to each other, a fact which gives them both a distinctive grace. Yet he superimposes upon this Paris and its suburbs another, treacherous environment which is neither invented nor a reality, but the suggestion of a comic mind.
In one image an old codger casts his fishing line away from the Seine. Seen from behind in another (Le pigeon indiscret, 1964), one of eight little boys using apissoir has been singled out by a dove who perches on his head. What is one to make of the two young brothers walking on their hands? Or of the cop whose air of authority gets swallowed whole as he passes a gigantic stone mouth on boulevard Clichy? Doisneau’s subjects are either endearingly oblivious to the illogic of their situation or else they tolerate it very well . . . which is even funnier. They live in a Paris jinxed here or thereby an unseasonable change in the force of gravity, all the more suspicious because it is observed with such tact. To walk through Doisneau’s city is to be foiled or undone in special ways, at any moment. At the same time, his courtesy is not only disarming, it’s positively inviting, a mark of sly wit.
Doisneau is extremely well-known, an acknowledged master of 20th-century photography, and yet his imagery for over 40 years has been fondly taken forgranted more than it has been studied for its actual depth. Doisneau himself may have been partly accountable for this, because the levity of his tone and the modesty of his style have helped to disguise a very reflective temperament. “If my work speaks,” he says simply, “it does so by being a little less serious, a little less solemn, and by its lightness it helps people to live.”1
His own life has been enriched with contrasted interests and experiences that have found their way intimately into his work. Now 70 years of age but looking more like 50, he punched a time clock at the Renault factory during the Depression, and has labored for Vogue. Literary peers such as Jacques Prévert and Blaise Cendrars were his longtime close friends, yet nothing makes him feel more at home than the camaraderie at zinc bars and cafes. Although cosmopolitan in his knowledge he describes, seemingly from the inside, the lives and gestures of the shopkeepers and artisans, the working classes of the suburbs, whose displacement from the city he keenly regrets, as well as the games of children, who run amok through his art. Their spirit animates much of what he does, as if here, too, he had privileged entrée . . . into an instinctual wonder from which his status as an adult—a very deliberate and patient adult—would remove him.
Nothing, from his point of view, could have been accomplished had he lacked patience, a sense of endless time at his disposal. Time is the resource Doisneau squanders in order to steep himself in a milieu. His work, for that reason, has a totally indigenous character, rare in world-class photography. That does not mean that he is slower or more persistent than others, but that he always plunges in from a definable position in social space. More than simply being on the side of the Parisians, he identifies with them; his patience has earned him the right to speak for a whole community. Paris is his place in a double sense: not only because he was born and raised there but because he has repossessed it in his art.
Loitering but not at loose ends, the photographer imagines himself as an angler in a propitious setting. ” . . . They always say that a photographer is ‘a hunter of images.’ That is . . . flattering . . . it’s virile, acquired power. Actually . . . we are really fishermen with hooks and lines!” There may initially be only a locale, a street corner, rue Mouffetard, looked at as if it were a stage indifferently configured by pedestrians. Then, in a poignant moment, all passersby but one are seen turned away from a blind accordionist centered in a drama. The relationship between these two “actors,” one who performs music in his darkness and one who sketches him from the rear, is highlighted by the averted crowd. Not only has Doisneau caught a voyeur in the voyeuristic frame of the photograph, he notes the contrast between two modes of artistic attention, visual and auditory. Even the sunlight that pours down to illuminate the musician, hooding the hollow sockets of his eyes, cooperates in the stagecraft of the action. The picture pivots on the basis of that which cannot be viewed—whatever attracts the bystanders away toward the edges, and the wheeze of the accordion—though both are sensed as vitally present.
The recurrent figure of the accordionist shares certain attributes with the straight man, but is in the end his opposite because of a genuine vulnerability. Doisneau tenders his respect for the privacy of all those who have to expose themselves in public. In one particularly memorable photograph from 1954, the martyr who endures the most callous and debasing humiliation and rises above it as he meditates on his exposure before the crowd is a monkey. As for those who cause the martyrdom, Doisneau calls them (in the picture’s title) Les animaux supérieurs.
At the core of his vision is the theme of curiosity. People are forever looking at each other, regarding the photographer, or scrutinizing works of art. In doing so, they only mirror the kindred engagement of Doisneau himself, who is involved with a crisscross of sightlines and with an inspection of the human animal. For him, the mysteries and misadventures of nosiness define the initial terms of sociability. Before they behave as anything else, individuals act as inevitable objects of display to each other. When he is able to show people scandalized by a glimpse of such display—usually they are of the bourgeoisie—Doisneau obtains a comedy of manners. When he projects the shock of display outward, toward his viewers, he ventures into quandaries of social life which can approach the metaphysical.
Take, as an example, the picture of Monsieur Heraut, the art critic, from 1950. In a sense, this is a group portrait of one person, since the debonair but vaguely shabby subject stands in front of nine baby dolls hung on the wall, each with a Doisneau-photographed face of himself. In asking if this is a comment on middle-aged infantilism or a contrast between photography and reality, one is left only with the ridiculous dignity of the display. The same goes for the three guardian funeral workers bemused by Doisneau as they stand behind a casket with such a peculiar shape as to house only a snake. Because they seem genially at home in such very odd circumstances, these people raise questions that are either droll in that they are disconcerting or disconcerting since they are droll.
Out on the street, Doisneau’s subjects generally go about their own business yet also seem to be inadvertently acting in a skit prepared for them or improvised by the photographer in the heat of the moment. Master of the ad hoc scenario, he lacks control over events but carries insinuating ideas in his head. No one, seeing an artist painting on a Parisian bridge, would expect to find him working with a nude, as he apparently is in Fox Terrier au Pont des Arts, 1953. Behind him and closer to us, an inquisitive fellow appears to be equally puzzled. Never are people more open to surveillance than when they themselves are gazing at someone else, a fact which lends this picture its conspiratorial charm. There is considerable interest in discovering if the model is indeed unclothed—the artist himself blocks from view all but her foot—but there is greater mirth in not knowing. Then, too, there is the onlooker’s dog who, like all canines self-conscious about the photographic act, may be only posing for his picture—or may in this case be truly a superior animal, alert to Doisneau’s game.
Such shots grant viewers the privilege of belonging to an expanded audience which gives them a further spectacle than that enjoyed by anyone in the frame. But the original object of desire is teased out of sight, as if one had been listening to music that had all manner of variations but had withheld its theme. A true music lover was once defined as one who, upon hearing a beautiful woman singing in a bathtub, puts his ear to the keyhole. Out of moral scruples and artistic delicacy, Doisneau keeps the private presence from becoming a public sensation. By concealing the erotic secrets that he constantly invokes—in a process that is earthy and yet refined—he also assumes a place in a French tradition.
In one of the most famous photographs of the 20th century, his Un regard oblique, 1948, viewers have discerned a typically Gallic anecdote. Looking into an art gallery window, a middle-class wife is intrigued by a canvas front we don’t see, while her husband, who wears a porkpie hat, ogles a painted female derriere on the wall. As a joke the scene is recommended only by its naughty ricochet, but it travels further than that, into a puzzle. For the 1890s nude that the husband gazes at, is herself peeking through a crack in the wall at an episode nicely left to our imagination (as is the painting seen by the wife). Doisneau has no trouble recruiting them all into his endless gallery of voyeurs, where he himself is active. More than that, all these players illustrate the infinite regress of the observant eye back into what the photographer has called the “religion of looking.”
Doisneau says that he has often been asked the “silly question”: what is his “wretched mania for taking photos . . . without a commission?”.2 He answers that it is purely instinct, “an irresistible urge to share with others the delight I’ve experienced through my eyes.” That joy, he could have said, is founded on freedom, a freedom to seek and to act playfully, like a child.
Much of the world he describes is, of course, very grown-up, standardized in its mores, class structure, and conventions. In this zone, he’s attracted to characters who slip up when normally guided by rules, or who construct their own rules and styles, like tramps, artists, lovers, and eccentrics. The lure of their behavior for Doisneau is not so much that it is antisocial as presocial, something which allows him to treat the constraints and hypocrisies of the social order as a happy butt of humor. It amuses him to include within that ordercreatures that are not at all human, but share our traits: his wise dogs, amorous statues, and “shocking scarecrows.” Without its realist side, which summons up the toughness of Marcel Carné’s films and the bittersweet lyrics of Edith Piaf, Doisneau’s art would be incomplete; but it’s the enchantment in his work that prevails. Just as his photos catch the underlying resemblances between animals and people, they also assume a likeness between subjects and viewers.
It’s a hybrid vision with which we’re dealing, an art so knowing that it can only express itself in quips and one-liners which fizz up all over again the moment we realize how cryptic they really are. To bring this off from a seemingly endless stock of epigrams, when everyone knows the artist is permitted only an inexhaustible supply of fragments, is an imaginative feat. With his concise ironies, which are so sophisticated that they look extremely ingenuous, Doisneau joins ranks with the brotherly work of Satie and Tati.
Yet when he actually looks at kids in their world, he has predictably little use for humor or irony. Their freedom from care is too serious to be treated as laughable. With them in mind, even Paris changes in aspect, becoming especially large in contrast to their smallness or particularly drab in relation to their radiance. Doisneau often presents the lives of their elders in terms of a theatrical metaphor, and of a popular theater at that—boulevard farce and vaudeville. Though natural performers, children have not yet learned guile nor given up their native dignity. Perhaps that is why Doisneau views them as existing in a state we once knew but can never re-enter, and therefore with a sense of loss that can only be poetic.
On the whole, children are pictured from further away than are adults, as if to have gotten closer would have been really intrusive. This slight increase in Doisneau’s physical distance from the children amplifies an emotional longing which is sweet though it does not cease to be candid. Quite recently, Doisneau said that what he’d like to aim for now is “an isolated image whose contents possess the magic power of remembrance or memorialization. This does not happen just . . . with . . . people. There is light, too.. . . These images . . . stay near like a little tune. . . . ” When looking at L’aéroplane de Papa, 1934, and Le Manège de M. Barré, 1955, one realizes that Doisneau has had that “magic power” all along, that, in the simplest way, he has long known how to turn a few shadows on a toy, or a glitter of sun through raindrops, into a music that evokes past time. A breeze has risen to flutter the hair and flap the collar of L’enfant papillon, 1945. One notices the dinginess of the suburban setting, the mud on the cobblestones, and the child’s wrinkled leggings. But on his face, with its open mouth and bright eyes, there quickens a luminous joy. Had he wished, Doisneau, in this one instant, could have rested his case for a photography whose “lightness . . . helps people to live.” Fortunately for us all, he didn’t.
Max Kozloff is a photographer who writes regularly for Artforum.
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NOTES
1. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Doisneau in this article are taken from the interview with him in Dialogue with Photography, by Paul Hill and Thomas Cooper, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979.
2. Robert Doisneau, Three Seconds from Eternity, Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1980.
