Marc Riboud 1923-2016

"The eye is for seeing, not for thinking." —Marc Riboud

A passage from Claude Roy's introduction (translated) to Marc Riboud: Photographs at Home and Abroad, first published in France in 1986:

"When you are a teenager so taciturn that your older brothers say things like 'You don't use your mouth, so maybe you'll use your eyes,' when you are retiring, fitful, vulnerable, anxious, then being able to take refuge behind the eyepiece of a camera, behind a mask that enables you to see without being seen, is a great comfort. When you are a young man at odds with yourself and later admit that you were torn between 'the fear of getting too close to people and another force that egged me on to get a closer look,' then being the man with the invisible face who makes other faces visible is rather a neat solution. When you are the fifth child in a large middle-class family involved in business, banking, and stocks, when you've been schooled in engineering, groomed for the workaday world, and destined for a job at the plant, then your father's Vest Pocket Kodak, or the Leica he's given you, become instruments to guide you towards wide open spaces, and photography gives you a license to roam."

Roam he did. More than thirty books have been published of his work, including many pictures from Asia and the Indian subcontinent. What I remember most about him is something another Magnum photographer told me about him: that, despite being a photojournalist, he declined on principle to photograph mayhem...no violence, carnage, blood, war, or suffering. "I have always been more sensitive to the beauty of the world than to violence and monsters," he said.

He took many pictures you have no doubt seen, of the Watergate hearings, the Great Wall of China, an improbable painter poised on a girder of the Eiffel Tower looking like a cross between Buster Keaton and a mime, or two black boys, blurred, shadowboxing on a beach in the gloaming.

His signature image distills the "flower power" of the 1960s: a young woman holding a flower in front of a line of National Guard soldiers with bayonets at the ready. Like many big hits I tired of that one long ago; in the Riboud picture that first comes to my mind when I think of him, we are looking down from above at a broad marsh, with a strip of sky at the top and a patch of dry land at the bottom, where a distant man in a white shirt is lying on the ground with his hands behind his head, as if to say, ah! This is the life.

Although his style and his concerns have moved back in time significantly since I first engaged with him, his work remains well worth getting to know if you don't know it already, with its gentle arm's-length humanism. He died last Tuesday, at 93. There are many obituaries, including those at the New York Times; at Magnum where he was a member until 1979 and still revered; at TIME magazine; at PDN, and at The Guardian, among others. He is survived by his wife and four children.

Mike
(Thanks to numerous readers)

Note: TOP claims Fair Use in reproducing the photo of Marc Riboud from his website, but we have applied for permission to use it and will remove it on request.

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Joe Holmes: "Digging around, I stumbled across a couple of outtakes from the more famous shots of the flower power protester and the Eiffel Tower painter. Unfortunately, they're pretty small images, though here's a giant reproduction of that flower power outtake. And finally, this is actually my favorite Riboud image. Talk about framing!"

Comments

[Richard Man]

My favorite photo from Mr. Riboud is the one with "Chinese windows"

Link from Tumblr:
http://65.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mb4cnm55cT1rxh0a1o1_1280.jpg

[Manuel]

Marc Riboud sprung from the same stem as Robert Capa, W. Eugene Smith, Josef Koudelka and Don McCullin. His pictures are unique and brilliant. They are, like those of his predecessors, reportage photographs that raise the bar to almost unimaginable levels of quality. After all, if it is feasible to combine story telling and an aesthetic language of an artistic nature, I can't think of a single reason for photojournalists not to do it.
People like Marc Riboud saw things in a different way and had the ability to convey it so that viewers would still feel informed. In fact it is not necessary to show corpses and mutilated bodies in their rawness for people to understand war: everyone knows that wars involve deaths and injuries. Showing the absurdity of war, its irrational and inhumane side, and do it using artistic standards, however, is something only attainable to the very best. This is the case of all those mentioned above, but also of João Silva and his Bang Bang Club companion, Kevin Carter, and photojournalists of perhaps less renown, but of enormous value, such as Anja Niedringhaus. In all of them there is the desire to send a message that is subtle and wrapped in aesthetic beauty, but which at the same time communicates effectively. At least for those who are willing to understand it.
Sometimes, however, it looks to me this ability to produce symbols in the form of photographs is a dying art. Today there are photojournalists who can't be bothered with the communicational side that a photograph has to have. They are more concerned with transplanting Pietà and Madonna pastiches to war scenarios, making pictures that exploit war and its horrors. I'm not one of those people who keep screaming and shouting their anger when WPP announces their prize recipients, but photojournalism is actually becoming frivolous. You can find beauty in the midst of death and destruction scenarios - Smith, Capa, McCullin and Riboud did it -, but make photographs in which only the aesthetics stand out is nothing. That's just a show-off for the photojournalists' vanity and does not say anything, does not communicate. Such photos are no story to tell; they have no content.
And they have no power either. Koudelka's photographs of the invasion of Prague and Riboud's pictures of Vietnam do have it, because they convey strong ideas. (The most important of which being that violence is always absurd and gratuitous.) I do not see this power in today's reportage photographs. Either they are based solely on aesthetics or are mere illustrations.
I can't help feeling that every news of the death of photographers such as Marc Riboud brings photojournalism closer to its end. It is as if photography is losing their heroes and there is practically no one else to give it continuity. There is room for hope, though – as long as Alec Soth and a few others carry the torch.

[MJFerron]

"The eye is for seeing, not for thinking."

Damn I like that.

[Gary]

"His signature image distills the 'flower power' of the 1960s: a young woman holding a flower in front of a line of National Guard soldiers with bayonets at the ready." Not really. As I recall the Guardsmens' bayonets are sheathed. Still an iconic image.

[You can't specify everything in a blog post. Basic rule of what I do. --Mike]

[Nico.]

You can view his work here.

Haunting pictures of Hauptsturmführer Klaus Barbie, during his trial (oddly listed under "Politicians"). Taking these must have meant a lot to the former resistance fighter Marc Riboud.

[adamct]

No book recommendations? I would welcome your thoughts...

Best,
Adam

[Michael]

One of the segments of "Contacts" has him talking through various of his photos in the context of the contact sheets they are part of. He discusses some well known images as well as some not so well known. Should be available on youtube.
BTW, in relation to your August 18 post about someone getting a detail about photography completely wrong, with the windows image linked to by Joe Holmes, the writer claims it was framed through train windows, a detail he or she must have invented. Riboud has said this was taken from inside a shop in Beijing.

[Earl Dunbar]

Not born there, but he is Paris. Yes, I'm still entranced.