“In Paris young lovers kiss wherever they want to and nobody seems to care”
This was the title of an article published in American Life magazine in 1950. Life had commissioned Robert Doisneau to take the photos, and one of these, the Kiss in front of City Hall (Le Baisser devant l’Hôtel de Ville) became one of his most famous images.
This was the last photo I took on my visit to Paris. I didn’t see this kissing couple at first. I was heading to a restaurant at the top end of the Champs-Élysées to meet my wife for lunch, when I decided to stop and take a typical tourist photo of the Arc de Triomphe. I had a bridge camera with me so I zoomed in, saw the couple, waited for the crowd to thin and took a photo that included most of the monument. It was only when I was editing that I saw the dog and the masked man and decided to crop down to this scene, which is perhaps only 15% of the original frame. If Doisneau had been there, with his fixed focal length Rolleiflex, he would have run forward rather than zoom and I am sure would have composed a better picture.
