The Last Humanist

© Willy Ronis

Willy Ronis, died on 12 September, aged 'just' 99. As BJP puts it 'Willy Ronis was one of the last key survivors of a group pf photographers known as the French humanists who changed the face of the medium from the 1930's until the 1960's (BJP, 30 September 2009, p.12). Humanist photography became the dominant form of documentary photography in the years following WWII (Bate, D. 2009, p.48) and reached its peak with the Family of Man Exhibition at the MOMA in New York in 1955. Out of the 2.5 million pictures submitted, Edward Steichen, head of the museum's photography department, selected about 500 images from 68 countries (Marien, M.W, 2006, p.308). For more on humanist photography see (Hamilton, Peter 'Representing the Social: France and Frenchness in Post-War Humanist Photography' in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, Ed. Stuart Hall, Sage: 2003 pp.75-150).

Elements

Recently I visited Andre Kertesz's exhibition 'On Reading' at the Photographer's Gallery in London (http://www.photographersgallery.com/). The show reminded me of a picture I had taken back in April 2007 and which I display here.

The image has three main elements: The person reading the book, the book itself and the location the picture was taken. All three elements have something in common, which is that they are not clearly identifiable. We cannot be certain about the gender of the subject, as we cannot see her/him. However, we could stereotypically say it is a female because of the red bracelet on her left hand. As far as the book is concerned, we can identify the author, but the title is covered by the reader’s hand. The location again, could be anywhere in the world, although the columns in the background give us a hint of something ancient. Therefore we could locate it somewhere in Rome or Athens for example.

But, does this lack of information make the image an unreliable social artefact or pictures do remain the sole key to represent reality accurately even when we are in doubt?