Connected to the capital by line 4, Montrouge, a commune in the south of Paris gentrified like its neighbors, hardly resembles this suburb, harsh and dark, immortalized from the 1930s onwards by Robert Doisneau (1912-1994) . But the soul of the photographer still hovers over the suburb and particularly over Place Jules-Ferry, where the famous author of Kiss of the Town Hall worked for over fifty years. It is here, in the Atelier Doisneau, that his daughter Francine Deroudille, one of the guardians of the temple with her sister Annette Doisneau, receives us. Heritage treasure, national memory… We don’t know how to describe the 450,000 negatives gathered in the “cold room” of the apartment-workshop. An imposing reserve carefully archived.
Francine’s comment: “My father had a complete sense of archiving, he had numbered, dated and captioned all his contact sheets. And, luckily, my sister who came to support him and then took over after her death is a born archivist.”
It’s been almost twenty-five years since Prévert’s friend left us, but he is still relevant today thanks, among other things, to the ten or so exhibitions that run year after year in France. Thanks also to the revisited publication (under the artistic direction of Philippe Apeloig, a great in the field), of the superb album The Paris Suburbs by Blaise Cendrars and Robert Doisneau, dating from 1949 and long out of print. A must nourished by the long, sparkling and scathing sentences of the author of The Lightning Man (Denoël) and by the black and whites of the humanist photographer.
Back in time. At the end of the war, Maximilien Vox, who had temporarily taken over Denoël’s destiny, said to Cendrars, then aged 58: “I am sending you little Doisneau to draw your portrait.” A crucial first face-to-face meeting, as Francine confides to us: “My father, in his thirties, arrives in Aix-en-Provence to meet this monument of literature. Cendrars will never stop telling him about it who he is, where he comes from. My father tells him that he comes from the suburbs, and Cendrars tells him, ‘you certainly didn’t photograph the Gypsies of Villejuif'”, he replies that he was born near, in Gentilly, and that, yes, he took photos. After seeing them, Cendrars will send him a note: “You have genius, we’re going to do something together. What an eye! No one was interested in this gray and black suburb.” This is how the Paris suburbs, which brought him into the big leagues: from photographer-illustrator, like his entire generation, the Willy Roonis, Edouard Boubat, he moved on to the status of author. In 150 photos, this superb work bears witness to the state of disrepair of the suburbs in the immediate post-war period, from South to North, and from East to West.
This is also the division chosen by Cendrars to evoke “his” suburbs, with barbs and flashes. Thus he is saddened at the sight of “cheap housing” (HBM, ancestors of HLM), so many housing units “piled on top of each other”, the beginnings of the “formation of a world of small, small -ephemeral bourgeois”. The Gentilly HBMs? “A belt of social hypocrisy, which the newspapers should periodically denounce, and not the threat of the Red Belt.” The “villas” of the West? Absurd, uncomfortable, hideous pavilions owned by “petty bourgeois imbeciles”. The northern suburbs? Black, with its gas factories, hospitals and docks. Having traveled around the Earth for fifty years, he sees no “exotic intoxication” here, but misery. The photo of the little sister and her brother feeding? “Terror in an ogre setting. I don’t know anything more tragic.” Obviously, Cendrars admits to being “systematically pessimistic”, a pessimism which contrasts with “the touching kindness towards the faces that the enthusiastic photographer has”.
But be careful, his daughter wants to remind us: “Doisneau is not at all the cantor we want to talk about, he has an extremely critical eye on the suburbs which was the ugly and gloomy landscape of all his youth, and that ‘he presents it like this. But the people he wants to show are not on the mat, on the contrary, they are young people with flower necklaces who have beauty and are, despite everything, in search of happiness. They deserve, according to him, another setting. The fact remains that my father loved Cendrars’ text, he remained very friendly with him until his death in 1961, he considered him a master of thought.” There also remains a wonderful dissonance between the outlook of the little guy from the suburbs and that of the Swiss traveler. And the crazy pleasure of delving into this past that is ultimately so close.
The Paris Suburbs, by Blaise Cendrars and Robert Doisneau. Denoël, 240 p., €49.