The Kiss by the Hotel de Ville

The Kiss by the Hotel de Ville is a black-and-white photograph made by Robert Doisneau in Paris in 1950, showing a couple kissing as they walk along a busy sidewalk near the Hotel de Ville, surrounded by other pedestrians going about their day. Commissioned by Life magazine for a feature on springtime romance in Paris and published on June 12, 1950, the picture looks candid but was staged: Doisneau had noticed the couple, theatre students Francoise Delbart and Jacques Carteaud, kissing in a cafe, asked them to repeat the gesture for his camera and paid them for their time, while everyone else in the frame was a genuine passerby unaware of the camera. Largely forgotten for over three decades, the photograph became internationally famous after 1986, when a poster reproduction sold more than four hundred thousand copies and made it one of the best known images of postwar Paris.