“I reacted with the title The Eye of Love. It puts into words what the photographic essay is all about: love. It is not about voyeuristic sex, it doesn’t exhibit my wife as an ‘object of desire”
– René Groebli, Photos of his Honeymoon in Paris, 1952
In 1952, Swiss photographer René Groebli and artist Rita Dürmüller were on honeymoon at a hotel in Montparnasse, Paris. The newlyweds spent their time secreted in their hotel room creating a series of photographs.
In their honeymoon pictures, Groebli’s camera tracks Dürmüller’s movements. She is often naked. He says the pictures were an “artistic approach not only to intensify the depiction of reality but to make visible the emotional involvement of my wife and of me.” Looking back he says at the picture of his wife who passed in 2013: “I still see, as I did in the early days of our relationship, her love for me and my artistic work, and my love for her.”
These are not the plastic pornography of our current age. But in 1954, when the couple’s pictures were first published, they were a sensation.
“I wasn’t really surprised by the reaction of the media,” Groebli says. “In those days only artists and people acquainted with the arts were used to nudity. Photography was not commonly perceived as an art yet and photographs of nudes were associated with pornography rather than with artful, tender erotic poesy. It was therefore not surprising that, prejudiced by common perception, the poetic photographic essay could hardly be judged by its artistic value.”
Times change. The Eye of Love series was later supported by the American photographer Edward Steichen, who invited Groebli to participate in The Family of Man, the landmark 1955 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The Eye of Love
“I reacted with the title The Eye of Love,” he says. “It puts into words what the photographic essay is all about: love. It is not about voyeuristic sex, it doesn’t exhibit my wife as an ‘object of desire’. Rita loved to create the images when we took those pictures. She took an active creative part in posing and composing. One may sense, while looking at these photographs, that she felt absolutely comfortable and, hence, acted perfectly natural. She was not an actor, but an artist helping to create scenes. The pictures are the result of a collaboration in perfect harmony.”
“My life as a photographer is all about movement. I took my first photographs visualising motion in 1946 and there was no influence from other sources. With respect to Lartigue, it must have been around 1965 that I came across his pictures for the first time. I never met him personally.”
– René Groebli
René Groebli: Movement is at Bildhalle Zurich until 31 January.
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