One in half a million

I wonder how I’d feel if I had an archive of 450,000 pictures that represented my heart and soul as a candid street photographer, and the one I was best known for was a staged shot I did with some actors for a commission. That the one picture was quite at odds with the photography closest to my aims and intentions might make my head hurt.

Anyone old enough to have walked passed an Athena store in the 1980s or anyone given to admiring the framed art on sale at the local garden centre will be familiar with Robert Doisneau’s ‘Le Baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville’ – Kiss by the City Hall. It is an iconic image, and one that gave generations of teenagers a bedroom-wall portal to the fantasy of Parisian romance. It earned M Doisneau a few francs too, but it seems that didn’t take the edge off