For fifty years he photographed flamenco dancers and musicians in the exercise of their art. He died tragically on January 20 in Paris at the age of 85.
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The photographer René Robert, noticed fifty years for his portraits of flamenco dancers and musicians, tragically died of hypothermia, Thursday, January 20, at Cochin Hospital in Paris. There was rushed after suffering a malaise Wednesday night Turbigo street in the center of Paris, where he spent the night without anyone coming to his aid except for a homeless who called the fire department in the morning. He was 85 years old.
Born March 4, 1936, in Friborg (Switzerland), René Robert is formed to photography in Lausanne where he took his first steps as a reporter. In the 1960s, he moved to Paris where he worked in fashion, advertising and also in education. It is Catalan, a popular Parisian tablao, he falls under the spell of flamenco dancers and particularly that of Manolo Marin and Nieves the Pimienta, in 1966.
For those who declared himself “with an education that hardly shows his feelings in public,” in a text written for an exhibition covering its trajectory during the Festival Flamenco de Nîmes in 2015, this revelation is irreversible. “I was overwhelmed by the strength, the nerve, the unceremonious expressive of these artists, how they put on the table the tragedy, pain, suffering, but also the joyful vitality, rhythm, cheeky, sensual.”
pictorial Timeless
This bright moment turns into a long-term passion. It is dedicated to flamenco whose excesses and trances sublimated prevail. He chose to capture the artists in action. “Because they are not posed but move and live their art … My pictures try to show moments of emotion, beauty and yet they block the movement, make dumb song and guitar.” Concretely he position generally closer to the plate. It also opts for the silver, a technology that will keep until the end of his life.
Over time, he made numerous trips to Andalusia. Tirelessly, he photographed almost three hundred singers, guitarists and dancers. Recently, these are the stars of the new generation Israel Galvan, Andres Marin or Rocio Molina took advantage of his eyes. With a paradoxical simplicity, it captures a dazzling gesture of a scream, the black and white, it peaufinait himself in prints, chisels in a pictorial timelessness.
“He liked to grasp the fragility of the person along with the excitement of the moment, says Corinne Frayssinet Savy, close to him, ethnomusicologist and specialist flamenco. Each of his shots restores beings transfigured by music or by dance. Everyone is in my opinion a manifesto of flamenco. He recalled the intensity of the lived moment and the fragility of the ritual that plays the show. “the work of René Robert regularly exposed and traced in various works including La Voz de los flamencos, 2008, is filed at the department of prints and photography, the national Library of France. It brings together 593 photographs in black and white, transmitting the precious story of a glowing art.