To mark the bicentenary of photography, the Belgian agency Tempora and the Atelier Robert Doisneau, founded by his daughters Annette Doisneau and Francine Deroudille, present the exhibition “Robert Doisneau. Instants Donnés” at La Sucrière in Lyon, the largest retrospective devoted to the photographer in nearly twenty years!
Through a journey built around a dozen themes and bringing together more than 400 photographs taken between 1934 and 1992, visitors discover Doisneau’s iconic images (children, portraits of artists and writers, bistro and street atmospheres) as well as lesser-known aspects of his social photography, such as young miners in 1945 and the suburbs of the 1980s, along with his work as a press illustrator and his advertising output, often funny and little known.
Starting from the most everyday reality, his photographs, often marked by humor but also by irony and tenderness, draw us into his unique vision of the world around him.
Following on from the exhibition held at the Musée Maillol in Paris in 2025, this touring show has been enriched with previously unseen photographs taken by the photographer in 1950 in Lyon for the American magazine Vogue.
While his famous photographs of Paris have traveled the world, those of Lyon — the ville Lumière, home of the Lumière brothers — have remained more discreet.
Accompanied by journalist Edmonde Charles-Roux, this man of the working-class districts pointed his Rolleiflex at the residents of the popular neighborhoods of Vieux Lyon and La Croix-Rousse, fishermen along the banks of the Rhône and the Saône, bistros, street kids, but also those who make up the city: artists, craftsmen, industrialists, and local notables such as Professor Edmond Locard, founder of forensic science.
This retrospective offers a varied visitor experience built around original collages, personal objects, and archival documents, as well as interactive and audiovisual installations. The exhibition features films of Lyon from that period, as Doisneau experienced it, drawn from the INA’s collections and rarely broadcast, which were digitized and restored for the occasion.
About thirty photographs are also commented on by Robert Doisneau himself, via an audio guide created using original audiovisual recordings from French public television from the 1960s to the 1990s.
A genuine immersion into Doisneau’s creative process, far from the reductive image of a photographer nostalgic for the atmospheres of streets gone by, revealing an artist deeply rooted in his time, an observer of the social world and of human relationships.
Fabrice Héron, Documentary Manager at the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel Lyon
Exhibition “Robert Doisneau. Instants Donnés” in partnership with INA
From September 4, 2026 at La Sucrière
