Quick Peek: Robert Doisneau: The Vogue Years

A long way from the suburbs of his youth and the clandestine workshops where he would traffic portrait photography and make fake identity cards, Robert Doisneau, one of the twentieth century’s greatest photographers, found himself within the hallowed halls of Vogue Paris from 1948 to 1952—the golden age for fashion magazines. His work during these years is an intricate balance of images of elegant haute couture and those of everyday life in France’s biggest cities.

Robert Doisneau: The Vogue Years brilliantly collects his best photographs during his time shooting for the magazine. There are little-known images that feature Brigitte Bardot and Bettina, both of whom he photographed in the studio and on the streets. He chronicled Paris’s vibrant society icons in their stately homes and at opulent costume balls, and he captured the spirit of the era with images of such luminaries as Karen Blixen, Picasso, Colette, and Jean Cocteau, as well as jazz musicians, writers, dancers, movie stars, and artisans, who shaped modern French culture.

This handsome volume—which features an open spine Swiss binding so that it lays flat to show off the photographs to their best advantage—also illustrates Doisneau’s distinctive humanist approach to his craft as he shot photographs of a post-war country alive with a renewed lust for life: humble craftsmen at work, a petulant child impatient for cake, fishermen showing off their catch on the quay in Marseille, and a wedding procession crossing a footbridge.

Through a personal homage to the photographer by his friend and colleague Edmonde Charles-Roux, the legendary Vogue Paris editor-in-chief, readers will discover a new facet of the elusive man behind the camera, who is as complex and beautiful as the people and places that he immortalized with his images.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS: Robert Doisneau (1912–1994) was a major twentieth-century photographer. His photographs were published in Life, Paris Match, and Vogue. Major posthumous retrospectives of his work have been held in Paris, at the Art Institute of Chicago, and at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York. Flammarion has published Robert Doisneau: Paris (2005/2010), Doisneau: Portraits of the Artists (2008), Robert Doisneau: Palm Springs 1960 (2010), Robert Doisneau: Paris Les Halles Market (2011), and The Best of Doisneau: Paris (2014). Edmonde Charles-Roux was an author and former editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris.

Robert Doisneau: The Vogue Years
By Robert Doisneau
With a foreword by Edmonde Charles-Roux
Flammarion, distributed by Rizzoli New York
Swiss-bound hardcover with fifth-color gold ink / 10” x 12 ¼” /
360 pages / 264 black & white and 4 color photographs
Publication date: September 2017