Location: Galerie Romain Rolland, Alliance Francaise de Delhi
Date: Fri, 2011/09/16 – 11:00am – Sun, 2011/09/18 – 8:00pm
Price: Free admission, open to all
Category: Exhibition
René Morel is a French self-taught photographer born in 1962, grown on Île de Ré in the Atlantic Ocean. As a teenager, he discovers photography through Edouard Boubat’s snapshots, and starts dreaming of roaming, and of fabulous images – two things he cannot ever dissociate. When, due to the vagaries of life, René has to board onto sailing-ships to earn his living, he regretfully puts away his old camera, a Zenit-TTL. But in his early thirties, he arrives in South-East Asia and takes up again with what he’s always regarded as a part of himself.
Like his brilliant inspirer Henri-Cartier Bresson, René follows the tradition of the «?humanist?» photographers. He favours black & white, a technique he deems essential for glorifying human beings, who he observes kindly, tenderly, sometimes amusedly. He seeks to offer to his fellow men a positive décor, while dismissing any political / social activism, since he intends to show nothing but what he sees – he regards himself as a witness rather than a magistrate.
Above all, René is a solitary, quite dreamy walker, whose approach, like Willy Ronis’, is “generally instinctive”, immediate, and never aforethought. All of his pictures are taken from life and “one could be surprised, not by the unexpected matters of chance – those are so frequent – but by the photographer’s being so often there to seize them.”
Based in India for several years, René carries his camera around everywhere he goes, with no other purpose than watching and showing the amazing world in motion in which we live.