The woman in the legendary Parisian ‘Kiss at the Town Hall’ photo, which became a symbol of Paris as the ‘City of Love’, is dead. Françoise Bornet died on Christmas Day near Paris at the age of 93, as a close friend of the French newspaper “Le Parisien” confirmed.
In the spring of 1950, star photographer Robert Doisneau took the photo ‘Le Baiser de l’Hotel de Ville’, which shows a couple kissing in front of the Paris City Hall. The black and white image probably became Doisneau’s best-known photo (1912 to 1994). An extraordinary success story began for Doisneau with the committed but posed kiss photo, which has become a symbol of the cliché of Paris as the “City of Love”.
After being distributed thousands of times as a postcard, the ‘Kiss’ was released as a poster in 1986 and was sold more than 400,000 times. In addition, the motif for the ‘Love for the Games’ campaign, through which Paris launched its bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games, was revived.
The secret of the photo was revealed four decades ago
But the kiss photo also caused problems. In 1992, a married couple claimed on French television that they were the lovers in the photo. This television confession brought Françoise Bornet and her ex-partner Jacques Carteaud out of their restraint and forced Doisneau to reveal the secret about the ‘kiss’ photo that had been kept for four decades: instead of a snapshot, it was an order from the magazine “Leven ” on the topic “Lovers in Paris”.
“He conquered five or six poses. It took about half a day,” Bornet recalls. Doisneau discovered the young woman while she was sitting on the terrace of a café. The then drama student walked past with Carteaud, the same age, who was also a drama student. They really kissed – but not in front of the town hall. For a fee, Doisneau asked the lovers to repeat the romance in various places in the city, including for the facade of the “Hôtel de Ville”.
A few days after this photo was taken, Doisneau sent the photo to the young woman as a souvenir. On the spine the photographer’s stamp and the number of the negative, 21.039. In 2005, Françoise Bornet auctioned the photo for 155,000 euros.
Source: Krone
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