PARIS.- The Jeu de Paume continues its off-site programming at the Château de Tours and presents an exhibition devoted to the work of Willy Ronis from 27 June to 29 October 2017.

In collaboration with the Rencontres d’Arles, the Jeu de Paume had initially programmed the exhibition Paz Errázuriz, organized by the Fundación MAPFRE, for the Château de Tours, for summer 2017. However, planning difficulties around the donation of a private collection to the Château at the same time, resulted in the transfer of the Errázuriz exhibition to Arles as part of the festival’s Latina focus.

When the donation did not go ahead, the Ville de Tours, keen to continue its collaboration with the Jeu de Paume, was quick to propose a new exhibition at the Château de Tours focusing on the work of French photographer Willy Ronis (1910-2009). This exhibition makes use of the collections donated by Ronis to the French State in 1983. Organized in conjunction with the Médiathèque de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, it pays tribute to an internationally-renowned photographer and presents some of his lesser-known work to the public.

‘Photography is emotion’ once said the great photographer Willy Ronis, one of the last representatives of the French humanist school of photography, along with figures like Robert Doisneau, Izis and Sabine Weiss. Many of Ronis’s best-known photographs are micro-narratives, portraying men and women, on the street, in ordinary, everyday activities. Today, these images, now considered to be iconic in the history of photography, translate less a specific moment in time immortalized by the photographer, than a particular way of representing a utopian humanistic vision. Willy Ronis’s work can be said to be an ode to real life and a celebration of the brotherhood of man.

If, to a certain extent, Ronis’s images subscribe to a rather optimistic vision of humanity, he doesn’t sugarcoat social injustice and focuses on the underprivileged classes of society. His sensitivity to their daily struggles in a precarious professional, familial and social environment illustrates the photographer’s own political convictions: a zealous communist, Ronis was committed to producing and showing images that depicted the reality and struggles of the working class.

While Willy Ronis’s work is often limited to his photographs of France, he was an intrepid traveller from an early age, and took numerous photographs of the people he encountered over the course of his travels.

His style is inextricably linked to his personal experiences and his unique photographic philosophy. In and through his work, he was never slow to evoke his own life and his political convictions and ideologies. Therefore, in his photographs and texts, we discover a photographer keen to explore the world, observing all those around him, and patiently waiting for the right moment to reveal itself. For Ronis, the art of photography was about receiving images rather than looking for them; absorbing the surrounding environment rather than capturing it, and using this to create his own narrative.