René Robert, a Swiss photographer known for his photos of some of Spain’s most famous flamenco stars, died of hypothermia on January 19 after slipping on one of his nightly walks through the bustling Paris neighborhood where he lived and lying sprawling for nine hours. on the floor waiting for help. Nobody stopped to help him.
The news was given by his journalist friend Michel Momponet in a series of publications on a social network last Thursday (27). According to him, Robert suffered the fall on Rue de Turbigo, between Place de la République and Les Halles. “He suffered dizziness and fell,” Momponett said on Twitter.
“Unable to get up, he was rooted to the spot in the cold for nine hours until a homeless man called emergency services. Too late. He had hypothermia and couldn’t hold on to life. Over those nine hours, not a single passerby stopped to check why this man was lying on the sidewalk. None”, lamented the photographer’s friend.
Robert has photographed flamenco legends in black and white, including Camarón de la Isla and Paco de Lucía. The neighborhood where he died is busy, with restaurants and cafes and also tourist traffic. A wanderer, he was used to taking night walks, and he fell in shortly after 9 pm, between a wine shop and an optician. He was taken lifeless to the Cochin hospital around 6 am the next day.
In an interview with French television, Mompontet claimed that his friend was “killed out of indifference”, and further said that he himself is not 100% sure that he would not walk away from a homeless person lying in a doorway.
The journalist had met him in the late 1980s, when they both went to flamenco shows in Paris together. Robert was “very considerate of others, funny, but a man of few words,” Momponett described. “He spoke in a low voice. He didn’t like to talk much, like many photographers. He always wore a hat. For years he always carried a cigarette in his mouth, then put it down.”
His comment came about because the photographer’s death took place in an area where many homeless people sleep on the street. According to associations that provide assistance to groups in this condition, around 600 people die on the streets of France every year. Robert’s death sparked a debate about civic responsibility and human decency in the country.
Source: Folha
