9 August 2013
Who is the young woman with a typewriter balanced on her knees, sitting by the Seine in Robert Doisneau’s famous and much reproduced 1940s photo?
As the legendary photojournalist made a lifelong career of romantically chronicling the City of Light, it has always been assumed the girl was some chic Parisian. But in her new memoir As Green as Grass, published this month by Bloomsbury, the 90-year-old English novelist Emma Smith has revealed that is in fact a portrait of her, taken during the summer of 1948 while she was working on her debut novel The Far Cry. Proof that the French don’t have a monopoly on stylish jeunes femmes.
