Across the Century
From 13.04.2019 to 23.06.2019
The Ente Regionale per il Patrimonio Culturale del Friuli Venezia Giulia-Erpac in collaboration with diChroma Photography, Madrid and the Atelier Robert Doisneau, Paris, presents the exhibition ‘Robert Doisneau. Across the Century’. The exhibition, through 88 vintage prints, narrates the photographic passion of the author who most celebrated the unrecognised beauty of the everyday, creating a collective imagination based on the lives of ordinary people.
‘What I was trying to show was a world where I would feel good, where people would be kind, where I would find the tenderness I hoped to receive. My pictures were like a proof that this world can exist.’
Robert Doisneau
The artist
Robert Doisneau was born in Gentilly on 14 April 1912. A shy boy who developed a keen sense of observation and a great love for the suburbs he frequented, which were to become his subject of investigation for over fifty years.
He studied lithography at the École Estienne and in 1929 began to take up photography working for the advertising photographer André Vigneau, before moving on to work as an industrial photographer for Renault in the early 1930s. During this period he began to shoot Paris, describing it as ‘a theatre where you pay for your ticket with your time’.
A life punctuated by shots. Industrial and sometimes advertising shots. Shots of a grey suburbia, factories, lonely or rebellious children, the war experienced by the Resistance, ordinary Parisians at work or at parties, a few refugees in the French countryside and fleeting encounters with artists and show people. Each photograph fits into a tangible reality.
‘My life is telescopic. Nothing was planned, only improvisation day by day. This was not at all intelligent.’
His artistic behaviour, more instinctive than intellectual, intentionally turns his back on any formal sophistication and lets chance intervene as a full-fledged actor. Unwilling to cloud emotion with concern for composition and rejecting imposed rules, Doisneau never bowed to graphic modes, but photographed the world as he wished it to be. A universe of fiction, to which each person is free to contribute his or her own story.
His essential research lies in that incessant capturing of tiny moments of a world that he observes with acuity to give us a modified reflection of it. He gives life to a fiction borrowed directly from reality, proposing to us a more acceptable universe through images.
The exhibition
The story of the ‘Across the Century’ exhibition is given to us by one of the artist’s daughters, Francine Deroudille, who together with her sister Annette, found the selection of images in the exhibition in a trunk:
‘The project was at the same time simple and ambitious: to summarise in 88 prints a photographic oeuvre, that of our father, created over 60 years. My sister Anenette and I made the first selection from the trunk of vintage photographs. The choice was instinctive and quick, dictated by the need to juxtapose essential photographs with lesser-known ones that could testify to his phototropism towards the beauties of the most normal everyday life. The selection outlines a world that no longer has anything to do with reality, the world that we daughters shared with him. All the characters in the photos have escaped with their personal poetics to an entirely imaginary world.’
All the themes that Doisneau worked on are on display at the Magazzino delle Idee: everyday life, street life, the suburbs, Paris, children, the reconstruction of France after the Second World War. A true walk through the 20th century, through his most iconic images such as the Kiss at the Hotel de Ville, the most reproduced photograph in the history of photography, and others less well-known to the general public.
Opening hours
Tuesday-Sunday: 10:00 am– 7:00 pm
Closed on Monday
Special openings:
Sunday 21 April
Monday 22 April
Thursday 25 April
Wednesday 1 May
The ticket office closes half an hour earlier.
Tickets
Full price €6.00
Reduced* €4.00
65 years and over, children aged 11 to 18 years and under
students up to 26 years of age,
differently abled.
*document required
Groups and children € 3.00
children from 6 to 11 years of age
Free of charge
Children up to 6 years of age accompanying groups (1 per group); teachers visiting with pupils/students (2 per group); one accompanying person per disabled person; journalists with a regular membership card of the National Association of Journalists (professionals, trainees, publicists) on duty upon request of accreditation at
info@magazzinodelleidee.it
Press office
Erica Prous Studio, Milano
Cell. +39 347 1200420
press.studioprous@gmail.com
