The belated honeymoon of photographer René Groebli and his wife Rita brought the two to Paris for two weeks in 1952 and in the following year for a few days to Marseille. During these travels some photographs were shot that René Groebli assembled a year later as a narrative essay of images and published them as an artistic book entitled The Eye of Love containing 25 photographs.
René Groebli did not want to document; he wanted to inspire associations. As a photographer he aimed at making feelings visible, convey an atmosphere, cap-ture a moment, express happiness. On their honeymoon Groebli photographed more than the objectively visible. He photographed emotions, the ephemeral, intimacy, sensuousness… and the love to his wife Rita. With the book he created a photographic love poem, a work full of timeless poetry.
Originally this was a free artistic endeavour; the publication of these photo-graphs was not planned. But a year later René Groebli worked on the dramatic composition of the sequences for a book: selection and juxtaposition of the images, introducing a plain page symbolising daytime in the chronology. Groe-bli did not just want to string together one image after another, his aim was to create a whole – the visual form of a tale. He then condensed the photographs created during the trip in the book sequentially in such a way that one gets the impression The Eye of Love would tell the story of a single day.
The most influential American photographic yearbook of the time, the U.S. Cam-era Annual, wrote in 1955: “The Eye of Love is a tender photo-essay on a photographer’s love for a woman.”