Photo: Robert DuanoIn Rome's Museo del Genio, a retrospective of the French photographer Robert Duano, whose photo "Kiss" from 1950, was discovered only 42 years later, was not created spontaneously.
The retrospective exhibition of the French photographer Robert Duano (1912-1994) took us on a one-hour walk along the Tiber to a part of Rome that tourists rarely visit. The Museo del Genio (Museum of Genius) is located in a building built in 1939 for that purpose.
The building was built in the style characteristic of Mussolini's rule in Italy. Before the exhibition of the French photographer, we also looked at the museum's permanent exhibition dedicated to the engineering of the Italian Army. Everything is here - the conquest of Libya in the war with the Ottoman Empire in 1911-1912. until the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935-1936, only Mussolini's photograph is missing. I remembered a scene with a picture of Duce from the movie Call me by your name. The day before was April 25, the day of the liberation of Italy in the Second World War, parades everywhere, anti-fascist symbolism, Hello Beautiful... And then, today, in a museum in a quiet district of Rome - Mussolini seems to still be there.
Robert Doisneau
In the part of the museum where exhibitions are held, until July 17 there is a really impressive retrospective of Robert Duano, who is considered one of the best representatives of "humanist photography". Due to his merits, in 1984, the then president Francois Mitterrand declared Douano a Knight of the Legion of Honor.
As soon as you enter the dark showroom you hear La Vie en rose from the throat of Duane's contemporary – Edith Piaf, and you see his most famous photograph a kiss or Le Baiser de l'hôtel de ville which Duino took for the American magazine "Life" in 1950. In those years, the American public was very interested in photographs from the life of post-war Paris and was particularly fascinated by the freedom in the behavior of young French people, since public kissing scenes were not common at that time on the streets of American cities, not even New York.
A fake kiss
The famous photo was followed by a decades-long controversy that eventually ended up in court. Namely, the photo was not created spontaneously. Duano saw a couple kissing in a cafe and asked them to repeat the scene on the street outside the City Hall in Paris. Acting students Françoise Borne and Jacques Carteau performed the "staged kiss" flawlessly, so well that for over thirty years it was believed to be a spontaneous event.
The photo was almost forgotten for decades, only to return to the public in the early eighties when a publishing house started printing it on postcards and posters. In 1992, a married couple claimed that it was they who were in that photo and initiated legal proceedings seeking compensation.
Then Duano showed the contract he had signed with Françoise and Jacques and thus admitted for the first time that the photo taken in 1950 for "Life" was not spontaneous.
In addition to this most famous photo, the retrospective also includes his works, where we see some famous people like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, but also completely anonymous people on the streets of Paris.
Biography
Duano was raised by his aunt because his father was killed in World War I when he was four and his mother died three years later. He was 16 when he started taking photographs. In 1932, he sold his first photograph to a magazine Excelsior and three years later he started working as an industrial photographer for the "Renault" car factory. He was working for the "Rapho" news agency when World War II began. He was mobilized as a soldier and photographer and after the German occupation of France in 1940, he joined the Resistance Movement for whose members he made fake passports and other documents.
After the liberation of Paris in 1944, Duonot refused to photograph French women who had been shaved to bare skin in retaliation for sleeping with German soldiers and officers. His namesake, Robert Capa, gained world fame precisely on those photos, among others. Then he started working for "Vogue" as a fashion photographer.
With his wife Pierret, he had daughters Annette and Francine. Annette was his assistant until her father's death in 1994. As girls, the two of them often posed for him, and today they work together to preserve his archive and legacy.
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