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Snap Shots: by Harry Flashman
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French bread and Willy Ronis
There
is a large black and white photograph on the wall of my local coffee shop
attributed to Willy Ronis. It is slightly blurred, and yet the photo does
everything that a photojournalist would want of his shots. The boy is running
with the long French bread loaf, and you can almost read his anticipatory
thoughts as he runs home with the bread.
In many ways, Willy Ronis is the epitome of the French photojournalism school,
being a photographer who probably showed post WWII French life better than
anyone. Even in the photo of the boy, the ‘prop’ of the French bread puts the
photograph directly into France.
Ronis was actually born in Paris, of a Jewish refugee father from Odessa, and a
Lithuanian refugee mother. The principles of photography came from his father,
who had opened a photography studio in Montmartre. The business offered three
primary services: portraiture, retail and retouching of prints for other
photographers, and the young Willy Ronis was recruited to assist in retouching
portraits.
However, the boy’s early interest was music and he hoped to become a composer,
but when his father died from cancer, he had to concentrate on maintaining the
photography studio and the portraiture business.
The work of other now famous photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz and Ansel
Adams influenced Ronis, who closed the family studio to allow him to concentrate
on reportage.
Ronis met other photographers of his generation, including David “Chim” Seymour
(AKA David Szymin) who would become a good friend. In the 1930’s he also came to
meet Robert Capa (then known by his given name André Friedmann) and Henri
Cartier-Bresson. The four of them, along with George Rodger, founded the, now
celebrated, Magnum agency. With Cartier-Bresson, Ronis belonged to Association
des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires, and remained a left wing socialist.
The advent of WWII interrupted his photographic career, but in 1946 he joined
Robert Doisneau, Brassaï and others at the Rapho Agency. Ronis was the first
French photographer to work for LIFE Magazine. His reputation was such that in
1953 Edward Steichen included his work in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern
Art titled Five French Photographers - the other four being Henri
Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Izis and Brassaï.
In 1957 Ronis was awarded the Gold Medal at the Venice Biennale, but his
photographic career was waning. He began teaching part-time that year due
primarily to the growing competition within the field of photo reportage. By
1968 he was teaching full time and over the next eight years taught at the
School of Fine Arts in Avignon, Aix-en-Provence and Saint Charles, Marseilles.
Some of his most celebrated photographs include Provençal Nude taken in 1936 of
his wife, the Communist militant painter Marie-Anne Lansiaux (1910 - 91). This
photograph, taken in a house that he and Anne Marie had just bought in Gordes,
showed Marie-Anne washing at a basin with a water pitcher on the floor and an
open window through which the viewer can see a garden, and this is noted for its
ability to convey an easy feeling of Provençal life. The photograph was a “huge
success”; Ronis would comment, “The destiny of this image, published constantly
around the world, still astonishes me.” Later in her life, Ronis photographed
Marie-Anne suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, sitting alone in a park
surrounded by autumn trees, to show the loneliness of an Alzheimer’s sufferer.
Ronis continued to live and work in Paris, although he stopped photography in
2001, since he required a cane to walk and could not move around with his
camera. He also worked on books for the Taschen publishing company.
In 2005-2006 when he was then 95, the City of Paris presented “Willy Ronis in
Paris”, a large retrospective show of his work, that had a huge success with
over than 500,000 visitors.
Willy Ronis died at age 99, on September 12, 2009, but his photographs live on,
even on the wall of my local coffee shop! It is worth your while looking up some
of his photographs and you will see the eye of the master.
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