The Sisters Doisneau, guardians of the paternal work

France. The appointment set at 2:30 p.m. did not deviate from the usual niche given to any visitor by Annette Doisneau and her younger sister, Francine Deroudille. This schedule was naturally established, modeled on the daily arrival of Annette at 2 p.m. in the family apartment in Montrouge when she began, in the 1980s, to help her father, Robert Doisneau, faced with numerous requests for appointments and exhibitions. “” Because the guardian of the building that was doing it, and we consider to be our adoptive grandfather, had retired ”she explains in her office in the old room she shared with Francine. Annette was then thirty, two young children. She came to attend him, for the first time, an afternoon he was particularly overwhelmed. And she continued. “I was a small hand of a” wonderful boss “who, every evening when I left, said to me” thank you for coming “. »»

On the death of the father, on April 1, 1994, she continued to come every afternoon to the Apartment-Atelier where her parents moved in 1937, and got down “To restore order, to sort, to order boxes to classify the prints, the contact boards, the press cuts, and asked a carpenter to build shelves to put them away”. Francine, 5 years old her youngest, worked at Rapho, an agency that represented their father since 1939, and whose director, Raymond Grosset, since the reopening of the office, at the Liberation, was like a big brother for Robert Doisneau.

It was Raymond Grosset who one day offered Francine to work for the agency for some time to understand its functioning and the archives because “ One day, with Annette you will end up with your father’s, and you will not know how to do it. Besides, I’m sure that will interest you ”he had told him. Certainly since childhood, photography and her universe were a familiar universe, discussions on the multiple subject, and from an early age, she had been used, like her sister to serve as a model. But unlike Annette, Francine, actress of the Jean-Marie Serreau troop for years, before becoming a manner director for her architect’s husband and their friends, was absolutely not interested in photography. Barely 30 years old, two young children and a sick husband, she nevertheless accepts Raymond Grosset’s proposal. She then learns to invoice, establish quotes, canvass advertising agencies, and take care of the books and exhibitions of the agency’s photographers, development activities. “I did not take care of my father who was happy to see me if at ease with the other photographersshe says. Without my realization, his universe became mine, and I discovered the professional hyper that he was, but in the mode of fantasy. »» The acquisition, in 2000, by Hachette Filipacchi de Rapho, six years after the death of Robert Doisneau, and the behavior of the new owners led him to leave the agency.

She gradually joined her sister in the Atelier du, 46 apartment, Place Jules-Ferry, in Montrouge that Annette had transformed into a place only dedicated to the archives. Together, they founded the Robert Doisneau workshop, structure in charge of the collection and monitoring of exhibition or works projects: 450,000 negatives are archived there according to the themes determined by their father.

As soon as the entrance is entry, the corridor between the workshop apartment leads to their respective offices. Francine installed hers in the very place where she was that of her father, while Annette is housed on the apartment side, an ideal configuration given their different temperaments which do not always agree. No exhibition or book project is carried out, however, without the agreement and collaboration of one and the other. From year to year, projects and programming of exhibitions, editions or re -editions of works have multiplied. Some are initiated by them, others proposed by photo historians, independent commissioners or establishment responsible in France as abroad. The number of turnkey and rented exhibitions is today, in the catalog, to twenty. From the retrospective designed in 1986 for Crédit Foncier de France to the last created in 2021 by Glénat editions on the occasion of the release of the book Doisneau bikes At the Sainte-Cécile de Grenoble convent, exhibitions vary both by their size and by their theme. The prices vary from 11,000 euros excluding tax for the exhibition “From the profession to work” presented by the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in 2010 and signed Agnès Sire, at 3,000 euros for “passages and galleries”.

Each year, a dozen Robert Doisneau exhibitions are thus scheduled in France and internationally, especially in Italy. In addition, there are regular contacts with the agency Rapho, bought by Gamma, concerning the sale of digitized photos, or sometimes those with the Galerie Claude Bernard which represents the photographer. They are not idle. Also when Benoît Remiche, CEO of Tempora, and Isabelle Benoit, commissioner for the Belgian company of retrospectives Eliott Erwitt and Andres Serrano at the Maillol Museum, offered them a retrospective Robert Doisneau in this Parisian museum, they first said no. But the perspective “ to work on a renewed and fairer reading of the work » Almost twenty years after “Paris en Liberté”, the last retrospective organized by the Paris City Hall at the Town Hall, leads them to reassess the proposal despite their busy schedule.

Collaborating as a co-commissioner for an exhibition was a first for them. Francine, who describes herself as “very authoritarian”, particularly appreciated listening, dialogue and the important work carried out in the archives with Isabelle Benoit. They were sensitive to the interest of the commissioner for certain subjects, such as the advertisements carried out by Doisneau, which did not arouse the same reactions at home, but which pushed them to deepen their research in this area. For her part, Isabelle Benoit took into account their wish to highlight more images on industry and the working -class world.

The age advancing, neither of the two sisters manifests the slightest weariness. On the other hand, Francine, unlike Annette, does not think at all in the future of the archives after their death. “I answer like my father when asked the question:” I will not be there anymore, that does not look at me. You have to ask my daughters “,”, she underlines. Annette who celebrated her 83th birthday, on March 31, wishes for her part that“The archive remains a family history and organizes meetings with their children, who love themselves, to form them a little. »»