The Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville (1950)...We've all seen Robert Doisneau's black-and-white photograph of a couple swept up in a spontaneous kiss. Paris City Hall forms the backdrop behind them. A man sits at a cafe in front. Pedestrians on the sidewalk clip by indifferently. But the couple is stopped in time, entirely consumed, and completely consuming. Taken on April 1, 1950, The Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville is the image that captures and projects Paris as a city of romance. But how spontaneous was it?We may have never known if it wasn't for the legal pursuits of a couple of elderly women in 1988. During that year, the French magazine Telerama put the image on its cover, prompting several women to claim they were the girl in the photo. Two of them sued. One claimed that, in taking the photograph, Doisneau had violated her privacy. She sought $18,000 in damages. The other, Françoise Delbart, wanted royalties.Doisneau had to come clean. He admitted the woman in the photo was Delbart and that he had staged the shot.