One of the great French photographers and regarded as one of the first humanist photographers. 

Willy Ronis was the son of a Jewish immigrant from Odessa in Ukraine and a Lithuanian Jewish pianist , who fled in the early twentieth century. After a job in a photography retouching studio where he was employed  "to erase the wrinkles of the ladies ," his father opened his own studio under the pseudonym Roness. Their son, Willy, born in Paris at the foot of the Butte Montmartre. 

Ronisen Willy wanted to become a composer. But when he returned from military service in 1932, he started work in his fathers studio. With his political leanings, it was natural that he photographed the workers' demonstrations of 1934. In 1936 his father died, the studio was sold and the family moved to the 11th arrondissement.

Willy Ronis then concentrated on reporting. Here he came into contact with Robert Capa and David "Chim" Seymour, already famous photographers. He also got to know Kertesz, Brassai and Cartier-Bresson.

But Ronis was unique, even compared to his peers.

Willy Ronis developed as a true original , marked by his attention to " harmony choral movements of the crowd and the joy of festivals." 

After the Second World War , he joined the Rapho agency and supported by his friend Romero Martinez worked on such illustrious istitutions as Glance , Time and Life. 

In the years 1970-1980, along with his activities as a photographer, he devoted much of his time teaching: the Art School of Avignon, then to the faculty of Aix-en-Provence and Marseille . He created a course on the history of photography and there he met Jean-Pierre Amar. In 1972 he moved to L' Isle sur la Sorgue (Vaucluse).

In 1983 he donated his work to the French State. 

In 2001 he created his last series of photos. 

In late 2005, the City of Paris devoted a retrospective on his fifty years of wanderings in the neighborhoods of Belleville and Menilmontant . 

Today the work of Willy Ronis is exposed in the world and his images are in the collections of major museums. 

He died the night of 11 to 12 September 2009 at the age of 99.