Willy Ronis - Toutes Belles

In this book Willy Ronis shows us the women we love because they are our mothers, our friends, our lovers, those who hold our thoughts and those that escape them. Beautiful photos accompanied by text by Régine Deforges.

Claiming interest in “ordinary people with ordinary lives,” Willy Ronis was among the foremost postwar French photographers, who spent his career roaming the Parisian streets capturing people in love, at work, and at play in lyrical black-and-white images.

Like his colleagues Doisneau, Cartier-Bresson, and Brassaï, he was a central figure in the “humanist photography” movement, celebrating the poetry in the everyday in warm, witty images. “I have never sought out the extraordinary or the scoop,” he once said. “The beauty of the ordinary was always the source of my greatest emotions.”

Ronis honed his sense of proportion and composition working in his parents’ photography studio. He holds the distinction of being the first French staff photographer for LIFE Magazine.