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ARTE broadcasts an exclusive portrait of the photographer Willy Ronis.
Sunday, July 5, 2020 at 6:05 p.m.
and on arte.tv until September 4, 2020
From the Popular Front to Belleville, to the German Democratic Republic, the documentary Willy Ronis, the battles of a photographer is the portrait of a man who was the great photographer of the common people and a composer of everyday life pictures fused with humanism. A merry kid running with his baguette under his arm, a little girl with a fist raised on her father's shoulders at the Bastille in 1936, a melancholic bistro under a curtain of rain but also a Bonnard-style nude from his partner: Willy Ronis, fraternal twin of Robert Doisneau at the Rapho agency, produced many emblematic images. Born in Paris in 1910 in the 9th arrondissement, son of Jewish exiles from the East, he grew up in the shadow of an idolized father, a photograph retoucher who he will start off with in his studio. The young Willy is an early witness of workers' struggles and will gather material from the thirties about the proletarian world: from factories to the euphoria of annual leave. After the war, his pictures imbued with humanism are snapped up by the illustrated press, in this golden age, between strikes, the poverty of slums and the frivolity of the summer taverns. As also a photographer of the intimate, this master of light, a friend of Prévert, captures the poetry of everyday life, in the steep sloping streets of Belleville. Wholeheartedly with the exploited and the humiliated, he joined the Communist Party, almost blindly, as the result of an enthusiastic photographic project ordered by the GDR in 1967. Sinking into oblivion, the artist was rediscovered in the 1980s. His unearthed photographs, treasures of the French school, established themselves as icons of the past.
Through his images, famous or less familiar, and interviews, this documentary is a touching portrait of this "great photographer of the masses", a romantic idealist, it is also an immersion into the battles of the century that he went through until his disappearance in 2009, at 99 years old.
Willy Ronis, the battles of a photographer
A film by Vladimir Vasak (France, 2020, 53mn)
Authors: Vladimir Vasak, Gabrielle de la Selle
Coproduction: ARTE France, Day For Night Productions
and on arte.tv until September 4, 2020
From the Popular Front to Belleville, to the German Democratic Republic, the documentary Willy Ronis, the battles of a photographer is the portrait of a man who was the great photographer of the common people and a composer of everyday life pictures fused with humanism. A merry kid running with his baguette under his arm, a little girl with a fist raised on her father's shoulders at the Bastille in 1936, a melancholic bistro under a curtain of rain but also a Bonnard-style nude from his partner: Willy Ronis, fraternal twin of Robert Doisneau at the Rapho agency, produced many emblematic images. Born in Paris in 1910 in the 9th arrondissement, son of Jewish exiles from the East, he grew up in the shadow of an idolized father, a photograph retoucher who he will start off with in his studio. The young Willy is an early witness of workers' struggles and will gather material from the thirties about the proletarian world: from factories to the euphoria of annual leave. After the war, his pictures imbued with humanism are snapped up by the illustrated press, in this golden age, between strikes, the poverty of slums and the frivolity of the summer taverns. As also a photographer of the intimate, this master of light, a friend of Prévert, captures the poetry of everyday life, in the steep sloping streets of Belleville. Wholeheartedly with the exploited and the humiliated, he joined the Communist Party, almost blindly, as the result of an enthusiastic photographic project ordered by the GDR in 1967. Sinking into oblivion, the artist was rediscovered in the 1980s. His unearthed photographs, treasures of the French school, established themselves as icons of the past.
Through his images, famous or less familiar, and interviews, this documentary is a touching portrait of this "great photographer of the masses", a romantic idealist, it is also an immersion into the battles of the century that he went through until his disappearance in 2009, at 99 years old.
Willy Ronis, the battles of a photographer
A film by Vladimir Vasak (France, 2020, 53mn)
Authors: Vladimir Vasak, Gabrielle de la Selle
Coproduction: ARTE France, Day For Night Productions
Posted on 04.07.2020
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