The heroine of the most iconic kissing photo: Who is Françoise Bornet?

The date is April 1950.

The photo was published in Life magazine in 1950.

But it was largely forgotten until a poster company discovered the photo in 1986 and turned it into a global hit.

The black and white photo also became the subject of legal controversy after other couples claimed to be the people in the photo and demanded copyright. However, their lawsuits did not yield any results.

However, this photo, which seemed to be taken spontaneously and reflected the romance in the city, was fiction.

In 1950, Robert Doisneau was traveling around the city for the American Life magazine and taking photographs for an article about love in Paris.

PHOTOGRAPHER: Robert Doisneau (14 April 1912 – 1 April 1994) was a French photographer. From the 1930s, he photographed the streets of Paris. He was a champion of humanist photography and with Henri Cartier-Bresson a pioneer of photojournalism.

The photographer saw Bornet and her then-boyfriend Jacques Carteaud, also a drama student, kissing and went over to them.

He said that he loved the way they hugged each other and wanted to take pictures of them.

Thereupon, an agreement was made for a photo shoot on another day and in different locations, and the couple staged this scene in exchange for some money.

The couple broke up shortly after the photo was taken.

To prove that she was the woman in the story, Bornet produced the original photograph signed by Doisneau.

This shot languished in the archives until it was spotted by an agency in the early 1980s and eventually became one of the most famous images of the city.

In 2005, Bornet sold his original photograph at auction for 155 thousand Euros.

Photographer Doisneua passed away in 1994, and Carteaud, the male hero in the photo, passed away in 2006.

Francoise Bornet, one of the heroes of the iconic kissing photo identified with Paris, died on January 3, 2024, at the age of 93.