SIGNED X 1 Willy Ronis - Toutes Belles (+ Nue) - 1992-2008

Two books of Willy Ronis's female nudes, one of which, All Beautiful (Toutes belles), is signed on the title page (unique and impossible to find a signed copy on the Internet). In very good condition.

1. "Toutes belles". Hoëbeke, 1992. 32.5 x 24.5 cm, 92 pages and 69 black-and-white photographs and list of illustrations at the end of the book, French text by Régine Deforges. Black faux-leather cloth binding with illustrated dust jacket.

2. Nudes. Editions Terre Bleue, 2008. 27 x 25 cm, 136 pages and 58 black-and-white photographs printed on recto only, text by Philippe Sollers and at the end of the book an index with miniature reproductions. Beige cloth binding with embossed title, tone-on-tone, on the cover and back, illustrated dust jacket with a band (OBI).

Willy Ronis, the humanist photographer, knew how to bring our century into light. The Provençal Nude made him known worldwide. Through these images lovingly brought to light, Ronis’s women are beautiful, all beautiful.

He did not only photograph his wife. All his life, at random of meetings and requests, he photographed nudes. "The beauty of the female body has always impressed me," he said in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur at the time of Nues’s release, a book made with Philippe Sollers. And the beauty of these female bodies, he knew how to capture with great respect and delicacy. In 2001, he decided to stop photography professionally. In 2002, struck by arthritis, he stopped taking photographs. His last shot is a nude that appears in the book Nues released in 2008. The great photographer died at 99. He had told Bernard Géniès the story of his "Nudes." (Le Nouvel Observateur)
N. O. Is the nude a photographic genre for you?
W. Ronis. I didn’t practice it as such. Even if my career has been fairly linear, I never considered myself a themed photographer. These nudes, I took over the years, without worrying whether they belonged to a category or not. Most of them were taken almost spontaneously. I knew most of the women who posed for me; they could be acquaintances or friends. But I was sometimes approached.
N. O. How so?
W. Ronis. Women sometimes asked me to pose nude for me.
N. O. You didn’t know them?
W. Ronis. Yes, it happened. In 1981, at the opening of one of my exhibitions in New York, a woman approached me. She worked at an embassy and asked me to photograph her nude. I agreed. For the book, I changed her first name and called her Isabelle.

Willy Ronis instinctively finds the moral point, the place, the lighting, the model’s position that allow him, in the face of sometimes unreserved bodies, to avoid falling into any of the traps of the exercise: the ethereal or the trivial.

Exemplary copies in excellent condition, (on the title-page area of Toutes Belles, a stamp reading "Service de Presse" and a tiny scuff on one corner of the Nue cover, see photo) Books from my personal collection kept with the utmost care. Shipping insured with reinforced packaging and international tracking guaranteed. For multiple purchases, possible grouped shipping with reimbursement of excess postage paid via PayPal.

2 kg. excluding packaging