About Willy Ronis the New York Times said:
'... The man who addressed everyone with the informal French “tu” was one of the last humanist photographers of the Paris school, alongside Robert Doisneau, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Sabine Weiss.....'
'[Lovers appear in many of Ronis’s pictures — and he knew what others would say about that. “ ‘Photographing couples on the banks of the Seine in spring — what a cliché!’ But why deprive yourself of the pleasure?” Ronis wrote in his photo album. “Every time I encounter lovers, my camera smiles; let it do its job.”...]
'Gérard Uféras, a photographer and a friend of Ronis, as well as the executor of his will, recalled ... how important political commitment was for Ronis: “Willy used to say, ‘As a man and as a photographer, I will die with my heart firmly on the left.’ ”
'.... “Twenty years before he died, when he decided to bequeath all his works to the French state, Willy started going through every single one of the 26,000 or so pictures he took since the early ’30s, and chose 590 of them as his visual testament,” Jean-Claude Gautrand, another close friend of Ronis, explained in an interview. “He neatly placed them in six albums, with a comment for each image.”....'
We excerpt from another source for a biographical glimpse:
'[....Ronis was born] ... to a family of Lithuanian Jews.... Ronis’s mother was a pianist. His father ran a portrait studio on Boulevard Voltaire in Paris, and made what Willy described as “a type of photography that naturally I viscerally despised. He did not have any visual culture. He was a good craftsman, that’s what he was.” However, because of his father’s terminal illness, Ronis had to take over the store and for four years did the kind of work that he detested: sentimental marriage photographs, christenings and communions, retouched studio portraits. “As soon as my father died, in June 1936,” said Ronis, “I abandoned the studio to its creditors and started photographing in the street. One month after, it was the formidable July 14, 1936… I was in the street with a camera that I took from my father’s display window before the creditors seized everything… a Zeiss Ikonta Bellows camera, with a Tessar lens and 4.5 aperture.”'
....
'Music was Willy Ronis’s first love; and although, because of his father’s illness and his family responsibilities, he could not become a composer, music can still be felt in his work, a subtle force within his beautifully composed images, lending harmony, poise, and rhythm to the most seemingly banal subjects. ....Even in the mid-1930s when working on assignment, Willy Ronis always requested that his photographs not be cropped and his captions not be changed—not the common practice for photographers at the time—which caused numerous professional conflicts, notably with New York magazine, which published his portrait of a trade unionist with a sarcastic caption. Though hurt by such callousness, he continued to accept magazine assignments and publicity work, but he chose his clients [more] carefully.'
....
'Music was Willy Ronis’s first love; and although, because of his father’s illness and his family responsibilities, he could not become a composer, music can still be felt in his work, a subtle force within his beautifully composed images, lending harmony, poise, and rhythm to the most seemingly banal subjects. ....Even in the mid-1930s when working on assignment, Willy Ronis always requested that his photographs not be cropped and his captions not be changed—not the common practice for photographers at the time—which caused numerous professional conflicts, notably with New York magazine, which published his portrait of a trade unionist with a sarcastic caption. Though hurt by such callousness, he continued to accept magazine assignments and publicity work, but he chose his clients [more] carefully.'
As we began:
'... [Willy Ronis] who addressed everyone with the informal French “tu” was one of the last humanist photographers of the Paris school....' and he loved cats.
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