Découvrez Les moments de grâce de Willy Ronis (interview) sur Culturebox !

Willy Ronis is the son of a Jewish immigrant from Odessa in Ukraine and a Lithuanian Jewish pianist who fled in the early twentieth century pogroms. Music lovers, they met in a friendly Russian exile and settled in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. After a job in photography retouching studio deemed "to erase the wrinkles of the ladies," his father opened his own studio under the pseudonym Roness. Their son, Willy, born in Paris at the foot of the Butte Montmartre.
Willy Ronisen wants to become a composer of music. But when he returned from military service in 1932, his father, very patient, asked to help in the studio. There is little interest in conventional photography, but a passion for photography exhibitions. His political views lean to the left, he photographed the workers' demonstrations of 1934. In 1936 his father died, the studio is sold and the family moved in the 11th arrondissement.
From that date, he has concentrated on reportage. With the rise of the Popular Front, the same ideals closer Ronis Robert Capa and David "Chim" Seymour, already famous photographers. It also has the opportunity to know Kertesz, Brassai and Cartier-Bresson. But compared to the vision of its peers, Willy Ronis develops a true original, marked by attention to "harmony choral movements of the crowd and the joy of festivals.
After World War II, he joined the Rapho agency and supported by his friend Romeo Martinez works at a Glance, Time and Life.
Belleville-Menilmontant On the thread of chance My Paris are among the important books he has published. We could then say that Willy Ronis, Robert Doisneau and Edouard Boubat, is "one of the major photographers of this school of French post-war who managed to combine talent with humanistic values and the aesthetics of poetic realism . He will participate in the 1950 Group XV alongside Robert Doisneau, Pierre Jahan or René-Jacques to defend the photograph as a true artistic expression.
In the years 1970-1980, along with its activities as a photographer, he spends considerable time teaching: the Art School of Avignon, then to the faculty of Aix-en-Provence and Marseille. He created a course on the history of photography and Jean-Pierre Amar meet him then. In 1972 he moved to L'Isle sur la Sorgue (Vaucluse).
In 1983, on the advice of Guy The Querrec, Claude Nori published his first monograph on the wire of chance to Contrejour editions, which will receive the Prix Nadar and encouraged him to get back on the front of the stage for new projects. In 1983 he donated his work to the French State.
In 2001 he created his last series of photos.
In late 2005, the City of Paris devoted a retrospective on his fifty years of wanderings in the neighborhoods of Belleville and Menilmontant.
Today the work of Willy Ronis is exposed in the world and his images are in the collections of major museums.
He died on the night of 11 to 12 September 2009 at the age of 99 years.