"A good picture reveals the creative powers of the photographer."
René Groebli
The distinctive, often avant-garde images of Swiss photographer René Groebli have helped shape photographic vision and design on an international level.
THE EYE OF LOVE, PARIS, 1952
René Groebli succeeded in attracting the attention of the photographic scene to his artistic work with the photo essay The Eye of Love. Taken during a belated honeymoon, 25 pictures show his young wife in intimate moments in simple French hotels, a playful poem in pictures. It is hardly surprising that one of the photographs, The Sitting Nude, found its way into Edward Steichen’s groundbreaking exhibition The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The stunning power of Groebli’s 1952 series still takes our breath away, the more so because we know full well that we are not looking at a model we might at most suspect of having an affair with the photographer but rather at the unmarred bliss of René Groebli und Rita freshly married, in a hotel room in Paris. And we are all fully aware that the woman’s gleaming white dress, falling, gliding from her body into the rustling of blurred edges, betokens an encounter known to us from our own lives. The pleasure divined between the pictures in this series is as scandalous as the love and familiarity between two human beings is enduring and touching. The Eye of Love is a work full of intimacy and timeless poetry – a work way ahead of its time.