Willy Ronis Retrospective, Galleria Carla Sozzani, Milan

WILLY RONIS - Retrospective 1926-1983
Galleria Carla Sozzani, Milan
13 September - 31 November 1997

“Geometries modulated by the heart” produced “during free excursions, with no specific goal, on the edge of chance”.

This is the story in images (149) of Willy Ronis, photographer and poet, sentimental walker from the Thirties to the Eighties, whose photographs, the product of an unconscious process, approach “automatic writing”.

Affected by events in history in his time – he was born in 1910 – and the changes and upheavals resulting from the popular front, and then war, Ronis always maintains a modest distance from man and his environment in order to find a poetry that is not immediately apparent.

He comments: “This activity involves a lot of risk, not physical risk – for I rarely cover distant places – but risk of failure.

While on some days subjects are served up to us as if on a plate, on other days we don’t see anything, not because there is nothing to see, but because we do not see what is clearly there. This is why the enterprises is rarely fun; it demands concentration, and therefore solitude, and is, at least as far as I am concerned, founded on rejection of the picturesque, the exceptional”.

A humanist photographer and a “polygraph”, as he liked to call himself, Willy Ronis worked in a variety of different areas: reporting, illustration, fashion, teaching, and was involved in many image-related professions.

In this exhibition focusing on people, he portrays a variety of subjects: Paris in the ’40s and its post-war people; nudes and public scenes; children’s games and young brides and grooms; Marie-Anne, the love of his whole life, and famous people (Sartre, Picasso, etc…). His snapshots are tender, funny or serious, expressing his bewildered search for communion with human beings. “Where does it fit in, the search, the truth? In the familiar, the universal dimension. Not in that which surprises us, but in that which moves us”.

Galleria Carla Sozzani
Corso Como 10 – 20154 Milano, Italia
www.galleriacarlasozzani.org