WILLY RONIS 1910-2009 - Lot 70

WILLY RONIS 1910-2009 "Rose Zehner, Citroën, Paris", 1938. Photograph. Silver print 2001, signed in ink under the image, stamped, titled and dated in pencil on the back. Image: 27.5 x 23 cm; sheet: 40 x 31 cm Bibliography: Willy Ronis "Sur le Fil du Hasard", Éd. Contrejour, Paris, 1980, p.13; "Willy Ronis", CNP, coll. Photo Poche, Paris, 1991, ill. J-C Gautrand; "Willy Ronis", Ed. Taschen, Köln, 2005, p.4. "This photograph was taken from a report for the weekly magazine Regards at the Citroën-Javel factories on strike. My diary bears the date March 25, 1938: "7:30 a.m. Citroën Javel. Reportage avec Léveillé et L. Guérin" - undoubtedly an editor and a union delegate - and then I read: "Tiré et porté 26 photos à Regards", on the same day. Now, the complete reportage contains forty-six negatives. So I had to choose among them what, at first glance, seemed both the most interesting and the easiest to print. The Rose Zehner negative is very underexposed, and I suppose I didn't have the corresponding paper gradation to hand. So it was neither printed, nor of course presented. I found it again while preparing my album Sur le fil du hasard, in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, in 1979. When the album appeared at the end of 1980, it was the photograph that was most often reproduced in the daily, weekly and monthly press. A friend of Rose Zehner's recognized her in the photograph in L'Humanité, and immediately informed her. Rose wrote to the newspaper, which sent me the letter, a magnificent letter. And so began a correspondence, written and then telephoned, until the following summer, when one day I received a young filmmaker, Patrick Barbéris, who had come to my home to make a short film. As we chatted after the shoot, I told him this story. He found it so extraordinary that he immediately decided to meet this woman. At the same time, the phone rang: it was Rose Zehner! And so a second film was born, recounting my reunion with the former Citroën trade unionist, in September 1982, in Paris." Willy Ronis