A French photographer by birth, Willy Ronis is a contemporary of Cartier Bresson, Brassaï, Robert Capa, Robert Doisneau & Edward Steichen, and spent an admirable amount of his time photographing post war Paris & France. His career began as a press journalist although he began his journey when he was 15 with a Kodak Folding Bellows Camera.
However, being very inspired by Alfred Stieglitz & Ansel Adams unlike other photographers of that time, he avoided the morbid reminders of the war & instead focused more on the daily life and common people of Paris.
Willy Ronis photographed nudes for Vogue & Life Magazines. He captured simple pleasures of everyday life. Not one to focus on suffering, Ronis’ photographs are often light-hearted, humor-filled, and full of compassion, embodying the French term: joie de vivre.
One of his early famous images of daily life in Paris is a little boy running, smiling, with a seemingly enormous baguette under his arm – named “The Little Parisian”.
Willy Ronis’ approach to fine art nude photography embodies his love for music & poetry. He used to take lessons in violin (while his mother taught piano) until he was drafted & later had to run his father’s photography business till his father passed away & he had to shut down the business a few years later.
Most of Willy Ronis’ nude photography work embodies simplicity & a deep admiration for natural human beauty. Aesthetically his nude photographs portray tenderness, spontaneity, curiosity and elegance of daily lives when one observes very intimately each & every movement, every shadow and every activity.
One of the most famous set of hude images, that demonstrated the deep intimacy & love with his wife & the respect for the aesthetics of fine arts, is that of Le Nu Provençal, Gordes, a nude of his wife Marie-Anne Lansiaux, bending over a sink in a rustic bathroom, captured in their house in the South of France.
The story goes like this. In July 1949, he was working with plasters in his hand filling cracks in the attic. He walked into the bedroom looking for a towel & he was mesmerized at the scene of his wife.
He quickly grabbed his Rolleiflex, climbed 2 steps & took 4 shots – he preferred to keep the second one. Picture taken, he quickly returned back to plastering the cracks in the attic.
In an interview published in Aperture, he mentioned how his images have a distinct visual culture & craftsmanship & influenced by paintings & drawings he had seen in the Louvre. This has been a traditional difference, and one that has inspired many of my own fine arts projects, between work created for business by commercial photographers & ones created by someone who remained true to the art till his death!
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