At the Maillol Museum, the irresistible happiness of seeing by Robert Doisneau

60 years of career, 450,000 negatives: the figures are intimidating. Robert Doisneau (1912–1994) produced enormously, affected by all areas of applied photo or author photocontinuously mixed with orders and personal work, crossed all the worlds, told a thousand stories to the means of the image as well as the writing.

We can often make everything say and its opposite to a work, but it is particularly true of that of Doisneau. He went to posterity with stolen kiss or three -stroke waltz, but we keep reassesing the less laughing of his work which has the photos industrieuses years when he was employed in the Photo Service of Renault (from 1934 to 1939), the Advertising images produced for Simca, Saint-Gobain or South Aviation, or reports In number on “the world of those who get up early” – minors, sewers, founders, chain workers, fishermen …

He published during his lifetime near 10 pounds in Paris But his most famous work, in duet with Blaise Cendrars, on the suburbs (Ed. Pierre Seghers, 1949). He passes for the cantor of the outskirts but, from these places which were those of his childhood, he pulled images both contrary and unified by the same disillusionment. He accentuated the melancholy of the vague terrains in the 1930s and the inhumanity of large complexes in the 1980s.

Between the picturesque and the poignant