"When I jumped in with both feet photography was made of wood. Now it is nearly electronic. But my nose is still pressed to the glass, with the same curiosity as on the first day." The author of unforgettable images, Robert Doisneau (1912-1994) was a great photographer of everyday life, made of small gestures, ordinary people, diligent schoolchildren, couples in love and friends meeting at the bar for a drink together. Above all this fisherman of images, as he liked to call himself, made Paris the centre of his world and of his work, and gave back through his pictures the image of Parisianness that visitors still look for in its streets. Written in 1989 and until now unpublished in Italy, this is his autobiography, set down with the same poetic cheerfulness with which he made his photographs. With fine humour and deep tenderness the text runs through recollections, anecdotes and portraits that follow one another among his images, where alongside the small lives of ordinary people we meet figures such as Georges Braque, Constantin Brâncuși, Sabine Azéma, Pablo Picasso, Jacques Prévert and Raymond Queneau. His life can be summed up in a single verb, conjugated in the gentlest of tenses: his friend the poet Jacques Prévert once wrote to him that it is always in the imperfect of the lens that he conjugates the verb to photograph.