Willy Ronis, Paris photographer, 1910-2009

You may have noticed my affection and awe for early and mid-twentieth century street photographers, ha, curiously also often from Paris, and especially Robert Doisneau and Henri-Cartier Bresson.

Well, today I have been admiring the work of Willy Ronis...


Place Vendome, Paris, 1947

... who has worked with the same agency as Doisneau, and been in exhibitions with Cartier-Bresson, and was also apparantly the first French photographer to work for Life Magazine, the B&W photography books of which I used to seek out and read in libraries when I was at school, one of my first photographic influences, admiring photographs of life like this one...


Le Petit Parisien, 1952

Willy Ronis was born in 1910 and died last year in September. His street photographs of Paris and portraits of French couples are warm and endearing, and his nude studies are beautiful.

I greatly admire the way he captures ordinarly life, and with kindness, much like Robert Doisneau.

“It is my contemporaries who most interest me, ordinary people with ordinary lives,”
“I have never sought out the extraordinary or the scoop. I looked at what complemented my life. The beauty of the ordinary was always the source of my greatest emotions.”

~ Willy Ronis, quotes to the New York Times, 2005








Carrefour Sevres-Babylone, Paris, 1948