Robert Doisneau - Instants donnés: the photo exhibition unveiled at the Musée Maillol

One of France's best-known photographers, some of his pictures have been seen around the world: Robert Doisneau is an artist whose art cannot be ignored. From April 17 to October 12, 2025, he is the focus of an exhibition at the Musée Maillol, which is staging a major retrospective of the photographer's career.

Instants donnés brings together over 400 photographs, taken between the 1930s and the 1980s. Fifty years of observation and exploration, fifty years of life and career in the service of art.

For Robert Doisneau, photography is a false testimony, an illusion of reality. He preferred to stage the everyday, to create more poetic, dreamlike pictures. Doisneau sought to tell a story through photography, rather than capture reality.

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The exhibition offers a chronological tour of the photographer's life. We discover the Paris suburbs where he lived, the artists' studios he frequented, his years working for Vogue, in fashion and luxury... The works reveal the way Robert Doisneau saw himself and the world. It's an often playful, childlike look, an uncompromising vision of a harsh, unjust world.

Behind these clichés, sometimes staged, the artist lets himself be guessed, and tells his truth, that of an everyday life where beauty can take many forms.

Through this journey, we discover a more committed, more profound artist than his best-known pictures might suggest. Robert Doisneau photographed Paris's beautiful neighborhoods, but also the poor and abandoned suburbs. He reported for Vogue, and in the mines of the North. At the heart of his art, we always find thehuman, the life.

The Musée Maillol unveils a comprehensive exhibition on the photographer's career, featuring works that are less well known but just as important for understanding the artist.

An exhibition not to be missed at the Musée Maillol!

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