Strolling and hoping. That was what the French photographer Robert Doisneau did in the heart of Paris. His photographs of everyday life play with the romantic image people had of the city at the time.
The culmination of this is the photograph made for Life of the flying embrace with City Hall in the background, an image that became an icon of the French capital.
It came as a great surprise when, in the mid-nineties, it emerged that the seemingly spontaneous scene had been staged, and that the protagonists—Françoise Bornet and her boyfriend Jacques Carteaud—had been paid to pose at the time.
The seemingly spontaneous scene turned out to have been staged
The original print of the photograph had always remained in Bornet’s possession, but in April of the previous year it was sold through the Paris auction house Artcurial Briest Poulain Le Fur for 155,000 euros to an anonymous Swiss buyer. The photograph, which by then had earned Doisneau and his heirs more than half a million euros, had sold 500 thousand posters and 400 thousand postcards.
Robert Doisneau (1912-1994)
