Archives : Willy Ronis sequence : his pictures of Belleville and Ménilmontant

Archives – May 28, 2018

From 1985 Willy Ronis immerses himself in his photographic assortment and selects what he considers the important of his work. He made six albums together with 590 images that symbolize for him his photographic testomony. These are the matrix of this exhibition. The Eye of pictures underscores the significance of this nice photographer who left us nearly ten years in the past by publishing every day one of many 9 elements of this distinctive exhibition, at this time: his pictures of Belleville and Ménilmontant.

At a younger age, Willy Ronis started photographing Paris and the neighborhoods the place he handed his time, and he by no means stopped. It was solely in 1947, on the invitation of Daniel Pipard, a painter pal of Ronis’s spouse Marie-Anne, a real youngster of the rue Ménilmontant, that the photographer found Belleville and Ménilmontant. The space was then a village contained inside Paris, but completely unknown to Parisians who, as a consequence of its dangerous status, had been too afraid to enterprise there. “It was a bandits’ neighborhood, one just didn’t go there,” recalled Willy Ronis.

For him, nevertheless, it was a revelation: he fell in love with the neighborhood the place time appeared to face nonetheless. He strived to painting a lifestyle that was easy and modest, but marked by an exemplary sense of solidarity. He visited bistros and workshops to satisfy unpretentious but deeply human people. He crisscrossed bowers, alleys, passageways, and backyards the place he discovered the identical happiness amongst craftsmen, archers, boules gamers, and newbie gardeners who perpetuated the décor of greenery lining the round railway of La Petite Ceinture. Willy Ronis thus constructed an unparalleled testimony of bygone Paris, suffused with the gentleness of a modest and, regardless of the ever present poverty, carefree life. “Belleville Ménilmontant was a great adventure. This was not about the accomplishment of a clearly formulated desire in my mind. This was a love at first sight…”

These pictures delicate to the on a regular basis lifetime of a neighborhood and stuffed with sympathy for individuals Willy Ronis crossed paths with would give rise in 1954 to his first e-book, Belleville Ménilmontant (with texts by Pierre Mac Orlan). The quantity met with solely a relative success, however it has since grow to be a cult publication, reprinted thrice, and, in 1992, was accompanied by a brand new essay by Didier Daeninckx.

In the Nineteen Sixties, Willy Ronis stored returning to the neighborhood, to the places of his early pictures. In 1990, the Bar Floréal collective organized a tour “in the footsteps of Willy Ronis through Belleville Ménilmontant.” His pictures had been posted exactly the place they had been first taken, pasted on billboards in store home windows and on the city corridor of the twentieth arrondissement. “I experienced in Belleville moments of personal happiness and of photographic happiness, which for me is one and the same, that is, happiness, period.”

Jean-Claude Gautrand

Exhibition co-produced by the Mairie of the twentieth arrondissement of Paris and theMédiathèque de l’structure et du patrimoine, in partnership with the Union of National Museums – Grand Palais, curated by Gérard Uféras and Jean-Claude Gautrand.

Willy Ronis by Willy Ronis
From April 27 to September 29, 2018
Pavillon Carré de Baudouin
121 rue de Menilmontant
75020 Paris
France

Tuesday to Saturday from 11h to 18h Free admission