Robert Doisneau's 100th Birthday - Google

The photo collage on search giant Google's home page today celebrates the 100th birth anniversary of French photographer Robert Doisneau.

Doisneau, alongwith Cartier-Bresson is known to have lead the way towards a new path in photojournalism. One of the four photos in the collage is his most famous unsecured loans photograph Le baiser de l'hotel de ville (Kiss by the Hotel de Ville) shot in 1950 in Paris.

Another photograph on the doodle is titled Le Remorqueur du Champ de Mars (Tug on the Champ de Mars). The 1943 image shows two children playing at Champ de Mars near the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Another is the image of a woman (representing the anonymous reader) bad credit loans at the 19th-century French writer Guy de Maupassant's monument at Parc Monceau, Paris. The fourth photograph is Le Chien a Roulettes (Dog on Wheels) from 1977.

Widely acclaimed for his ironic images as well as those that depicted juxtapositions, Doisneau's photographs mingled social classes, and eccentrics in contemporary Paris streets and cafes. Doisneau lost his parents in childhood. His father died during World War I when he was only four, his mother too died some three years later. He was raised by his aunt.

At 13, Doisneau joined a craft school where he was first introduced to the arts, participating in still life and figure drawing. He earned diplomas in lithography and engraving here.

At 16 he discovered photography. According to some accounts, in the initial days of his photography he was so shy that he'd only photograph cobblestones. Doisneau later moved to photographing children and then adults.

In the 1920s, he joined an advertising company. In 1932 he sold his first photo-story to Excelsior newspaper. In 1939 he took up a job working with postcard photography and freelance advertising services. Later that year he was drafted as a photographer and a Resistance soldier.

He used his skills to forge identification papers and passports. During this time he photographed the Battle of Paris. After the war he worked for Life magazine and he also worked with Paris Vogue doing fashion and high-class photography. He won the Prix Kodak in 1947.