Robert Doisneau: A Photographer at the Museum

French National Museum of Natural History, Paris. Until 18 January 2016.

In 1942, French photographer Robert Doisneau (perhaps best known for his image of a couple kissing outside the Hotel de Ville) was commissioned to record life behind the scenes at the various arms of the National Museum of Natural History (MNHN) in Paris. Most of the images have never been published. They are a unique document of the work of a research institute in occupied France during the Second World War. Now, a small jewel of an exhibition brings them out of the stores where they were taken, and places them in the limelight where they belong.

The Funeral Procession of the Jaguar: a technician transports a specimen in 1943. Credit: Robert Doisneau/Gamma-Rapho via Getty

Doisneau was a member of the French Resistance; he produced fake identity papers for his comrades-in-arms. The commission to photograph two Paris museums, the botanical gardens and a zoo that are part of the MNHN, was offered to him by the influential publisher Maximilien Vox (real name, Samuel Monod), acting on behalf of the Vichy government. Sympathetic to the Germans, this puppet regime wanted to vaunt the vitality of French intellectual life under its beneficent new rulers.

Why did Doisneau agree to such a dubious assignment? Recently returned from the army, he probably just needed the cash. His first baby had only recently been born, and a commission from Vox was not something that a young photographer turned down. Furthermore, lauding France's academic excellence need not have struck him as a betrayal.

What Doisneau found as he toured the museums and gardens was a vibrant research institute — despite, rather than because of, the intrusion of world events. Paul Rivet, director of the MNHN's Museum of Man, was in exile in Colombia. Others had just returned from military service or prisoner-of-war camps — including the palaeontologist Camille Arambourg, now remembered for defending Neanderthals against accusations of simian brutishness.

A demobilized botanist, André Guillaumin, was searching for coal to heat the vast greenhouses. A major effort was under way to reorganize the collections, which were just starting to return, having been evacuated in 1939. Publication had been slowed but not stopped by the censors. At the Museum of Man, a resistance cell had been dismantled and its members executed or deported.

Emerging from such tensions, the images take on extra significance. Doisneau wrote later that he was struck by the contrast between the moment of history he inhabited — of which his growling stomach served as a constant reminder — and the geological epochs spanned by the collections. He used that contrast to powerful effect.

Some of the images seem downright insolent, such as that of Paul Budker of the Laboratory of Fish and Colonial Animals gazing into a jar of baby sharks — a Frenchman inspecting imprisoned predators. Others find a wistful wisdom in scenes from the museum's daily life. One such is The Funeral Procession of the Jaguar: the beast is pushed in a wheelbarrow over cobbles to the taxidermy department. Another, showing a white-coated woman with a wizened corpse on her hip and a faraway look in her eyes, Doisneau entitled The Surprising Lightness of a Peruvian Mummy.

Vox had envisaged a collection called The Face of Science. Overtaken by events, it never saw the light of day. In November 1942, Allied forces landed in North Africa, prompting the Germans to invade previously unoccupied southern France, rendering the Vichy government impotent. The photos were consigned to the museum library.

Paul Budker of the Laboratory of Fish and Colonial Animals with a jar of baby sharks in 1943. Credit: Atelier Robert Doisneau

In 1990, the museum invited Doisneau back to complete his project. This postscript was a good idea: the contrast between the two sets of photos speaks volumes. Doisneau was in his late seventies and famous. The museum, too, had changed, and Doisneau delighted in discovering its three new subterranean floors of storage. The later images are as closely observed as the earlier ones. But now — as in a picture of a stuffed gorilla in a lift, emerging from or descending into the museum's bowels — the irony is less loaded, and the delight floats free.