Born in 1927 in Zurich, Switzerland. Lives and works in Zurich.

René Groebli began an apprenticeship as a photographer in 1944, but then changed the course of his studies, enrolling at the Zurich School of Applied Arts, where he studied under Hans Finsler. In 1948, he obtained a diploma as a documentary cinematographer. Groebli wanted to photograph the intangible: movement, dynamics and speed. Rail Magic, a series from 1949, was a subsequent photo essay, which allegorizes the French steam railway as a symbol of power.

In the early 1950s, Groebli executed assignments for Zürcher Woche and the agency Black Star in Africa and the Middle East. These pictures were also published in Life Magazine, Picture Post and other international magazines. In the following years, Groebli opened a photo studio for industrial and advertising photography. Groebli went with his wife to Paris and southern France in 1953, where he shot the photo essay Das Auge der Liebe (The Eye of Love), which attracted the attention of Edward Steichen. René Groebli’s photographs were represented among the works of the Swiss photographers Werner Bischof and Robert Frank in the exhibition The Family of Man, which was curated by Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1951. In the 1980s, Groebli lost interest in advertising photography and focused instead on the various options black and white photography had to offer. In 1999, Kunsthaus Zurich showed a representative selection of his works from 1946-1996 with the title Magie und Melancholie (Magic and Melancholy).