Françoise Bornet, the woman in the famous photograph of Doisneau's kiss, dies in Paris

Françoise Bornet, the woman protagonist of the famous photograph of the kiss by Robert Doisneau (1912-1994) in front of the Paris City Hall, died on December 25 at the age of 93 in Évreux (Normandy), as a result of a domestic accident. However, her death was not reported until Tuesday in the French press. Bornet went down in eternity for the black and white image that Doisneau made of her kissing her boyfriend at the time, Jacques Carteaud, a drama student like her.

The photo, titled The kiss from the hôtel de Ville, was taken in the spring of 1950, when she was barely 20 years old and Carteaud was 23, and was part of a report that the magazine life He had commissioned Doisneau about lovers in Paris to show the joy of living in the French capital after the years of horror due to the German occupation in World War II. Doisneau, a classic photographer of the 20th century, said that “photography is like stopping life to fight death, but it is a lost fight from the beginning.”

Doisneau himself humorously told the story of this image in a documentary dedicated to his life and work. He was in charge of hiring the actors for the report and had them pose in different recognizable spaces in Paris. The snapshot, as sometimes happens in the history of photography, was forgotten after it was taken. Furthermore, Bornet and Carteaud broke off their relationship. She continued in the theater, where she performed plays directed by François Périer and Pierre Brasseur, also actors. Eventually, she married Alain Bornet, from whom she took her married name.

In 1988, a French magazine recovered that image wondering what had become of those young people. It was the beginning of the boom of this image, helped by the mass reproduction of postcards, posters and mugs that showed that moment of passion of the couple and symbolized romantic Paris.

However, the cross of that success came to Doisneau when Bornet wanted to demand from him, in 1993, a percentage of everything that the photo had generated. The French Justice denied it, with the peculiar argument that his face was not clearly recognized as it was covered by Carteaud's, but above all because he testified at the trial in favor of Doisneau. The photographer's eldest daughter, Annete, declared in 2016, on the occasion of an exhibition in Madrid, that that trial cost her father her health and her life, since he died months later. “He never could understand it. Although he died of a liver problem, deep down it was sadness that killed him,” she lamented.

Doisneau was a man marked by the early death of his mother, when he was only seven years old, and the harsh treatment of the woman his father later married. Self-taught, he had the people skills to win over his subjects and thanks to his craft he became friends with numerous artists. His photography is characterized by the search for the beauty of life in everyday scenes, and although he portrayed humble people, he always did so highlighting their dignity. In 1932 he published his first report, on the Paris Trail, and then worked as an industrial photographer in a Renault factory and as a reporter at the Rapho agency, in addition to his own work.

For photography fans there are books by Doisneau such as The outskirts of Paris and Snapshots of Paris, and the image of what is perhaps the most famous kiss in history, although it was a prepared kiss, but what a kiss.