Willy Ronis

1910 — 2009

Willy Ronis was a French photographer and a key figure within the humanist movement whose extraordinary body of work, amassed over the span of one century, crafted a vivid portrait of postwar and mid-twentieth century Paris, often reflecting his ardent leftist political leanings. Ronis was the first French photographer on staff at Life magazine, worked commercially in fashion and was published in Vogue, and for a period taught fine arts in Provence. He considered his legacy long before his actual death, curating his own career retrospective in the late '80s.

Ronis shot in black and white, capturing the joys of everyday life and the innocence of children, with a particular penchant for love and romance: “Every time I encounter lovers," he said, "my camera smiles." In one shot that has since entered the Parisian canon, The Lovers of the Bastille (1957), a man whispers into the ear of a woman, stood on a terrace overlooking the Seine and the Eiffel Tower. Beauty and empathy were the cornerstones of his work, evident in every photograph Ronis took.

Ronis died in 2009, a few months short of a full century. He lived to see a career retrospective in Paris City Hall, in 2005; some half a million visitors were estimated to have attended. Ronis' self-curated retrospective, titled Willy Ronis by Willy Ronis, was shown at the Carré de Baudouin in 2018. His massive body of work contains over one hundred thousand negatives and prints, and since 2015 the Belvédère Willy-Ronis in Paris has been named in his honour. He continues to be published globally, and is universally recognised as one of the greatest and most enduring photographic artists of the twentieth century.