Marc Riboud - Poet of the Lens

“The memory of an image is nothing but the regret of an instant.” - Marcel Proust

Although his name may not be as familiar to the general public as other great photographers such as Ansel Adams or Henri Cartier-Bresson, Marc Riboud is without a doubt one of the greatest photographers of the XX century.

His eloquent and artistic black and white pictures became iconic portraits of the eras he portrayed, in a career that spawned over five decades - images charged with deep humanity and a poetic vision of the world.

India, Darjeeling ,1956

The first photograph that Marc Riboud took at age 8, gave no indication of the talent for intimacy of the future photographer: a passing couple on the street handed him a camera and asked him to take a picture of them. When the couple posed kissing, the boy felt so embarrassed that he pressed the obturator with his eyes closed.

Marc Riboud never got to see the result of that first ‘click’, but his images as a professional photographer for ‘Magnum’ (the most respected photojournalism agency in the planet), and later as an independent photographer, bellied the shyness of this native of Lyon, France.

Paris, Pont des Arts, 1953

Riboud’s beginnings in photography were also slow and timid. Although he began taking pictures in 1937, when his father gave him a Vest Pocket Kodak camera for his 14th birthday, it was not until he was 30 when he turned to photography as a full-time profession.

Graduated as Engineer from Lyon’s Central School, Marc Riboud served as a photojournalist for local events during his student years. But his interest in photography took a more serious turn during a break he took in 1951 in order to photograph the Lyon Festival. After this experience, Riboud decided to quit his job and turn towards photography full time.

In 1953 Riboud managed to have his striking picture “Zazou, Eiffel Tower Painter” published by Life Magazine. This success, along his passion for the media and his wish to travel, made Riboud decide to make photography his life.

Zazou, Eiffel Tower Painter, 1953

That year he moved to Paris, where he met Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, the founders of the ‘Magnum’ Photography Agency, who invited him to join the agency. Riboud’s first professional trip was to Yugoslavia, at the suggestion of Cartier-Bresson, before spending a year photographing in England.

Riboud learned the ropes of the trade at Magnum. Following the agency’s parameters, he was free to seek and chose his own stories, but the agency would only buy his pictures if they conformed a cohesive collection. A single great image, such as that of Zazou, was not enough - they had to be a collection of great shots with a solid story behind them.

England, 1954

From 1955 onwards, Marc Riboud engaged in extensive trips (the first of which threaded through the Middle East, Afghanistan, India, China and Japan), capturing the landscapes, lifestyle and living conditions of the exotic locations before his lens.

In 1957, Riboud visited China, the first in what would become a string of long and fruitful trips to the exotic location, to document its culture and its people.

It’s key to remember that at the time of his first visit, China was a most inaccessible state, with stern regulations on who could enter, on what purpose and under which conditions. In this context, Marc Riboud was a pioneer photojournalist, and his images not only captured the life of the then-inaccessible nation, but  allowed the people of the West to witness its reality with a rare level of intimacy.

Beijing, 1957

Such level of closeness in photography seldom comes without a deep sympathy for and close contact with the subject. Yet Riboud expressed a certain duality about the relationship of the photographer and his subject, stating that he felt both an extraordinary wish to approach, but also the fear of entering their intimacy and of getting too close.

 Japan, 1958

Just like painting, photography is based on specific technical canons to prove its worth: sharp focus, rich tones of grays and whites, a good balance of colour, harmonious composition, interesting point of view, etc.

In addition to these, each photographer must add his/her own personal touch to identify the image as unique - a kind of wordless signature that allows the spectator to recognize it as his/hers.

Although Riboud’s first photographs carry a visible influence from his colleague Henri Cartier-Bresson, as he progressed in the field he developed his own particular style.

Building of the Syhan Dam, Turkey, 1955

However, Marc Riboud not only had an ‘eye’ for photography, but also a poetic discourse for it. In his pictures we not only see a moment frozen in time, but we can also feel the overall environment around it.

And while most pictures convey a story, Riboud’s images sometimes even threaded several within the same frame. Such is the case of his picture of the Moscow students at Gorki Park from 1960. The intriguing composition of the elusive characters arise our interest. What is that boy reading? Who’s he playing chess with? Why are they there? Who’s the little girl behind the tree? Why is she smiling?

 Moscow, Gorky Park, 1960

Although as photojournalist Riboud covered the most important social upheavals and historical moments of his time, his images willfully steer away from violence, intent instead on capturing the people that made those movements unique.

This approach provides the viewer with the human face behind the different social movements, allowing us to see those who lived them, establishing thus an invisible link of humanity between those pictured and the spectators.

Such is the case of one of his most iconic images: a lone girl holding a flower in peaceful gesture against a battalion of soldiers in attacking stance.

 Flower Girl, Washington D.C., 1967

Riboud captured the scene during an anti-Vietnam rally in 1967, and after its publication it became the poster image of the Peace movement. Many years later, in 2002, Riboud would meet again the young protester, Jan Rose Kasmir, at another rally, this time in France.

Riboud made a total of four extensive trips to China, documenting the Cultural revolution and the country’s rapid progress through the second half of the XX century.

Hong Shou Mountains, China, 1965       

In addition to his documentary photographs, Riboud also photographed a long list of famous faces and celebrities for different motives : from news articles and coverages to commercial ads.

Marcel Marceau, Jacques Chirac, Audrey Hepburn, Indira Ghandi, The Beatles, Winston Churchill, Fidel Castro, Giorgio Armani, Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Jean-Paul Sartre, Lech Walesa and many more passed before his lens, not always in pre-arranged photo shoots but as a photojournalist covering a social event.

Marcel Marceau, 1988

In his over 50 years as a professional photographer (26 of them with Magnum), Marc Riboud travelled to Yugoslavia, England, the Middle East, India, China, Japan, United States, Ghana, Nigeria, Algeria, Afghanistan, Iran, the URSS, Cuba, Mexico, Poland, Vietnam and Pakistan among many other destinations.  

For Riboud, a good photographer required an active stance, agility, good visual and motor reflexes, and a penchant for long walks. As he often stated, half-joking: “In order to make good pictures one must have, above all, good shoes.”

In 2011, Riboud donated 192 original prints of his work, done from 1953 through 1977, to the Centre Georges Pompidou. His archives are kept at the National Museum of Asian Arts, Guimet in Paris, but his work continues to be collected and exhibited around the world, more recently at the ‘House of Arts’ in Bratislava and the ‘In Focus Gallery’ in Germany.

Marc Riboud died in Paris in 2016, at age 93, but his photography legacy captures not only pivotal characters and moments in history, but lifestyles, cultures and locations that once seemed eternal and are now quickly vanishing under the ruthless advance of progress.

Strange Reflections, Netherlands, 1994

Marc Riboud’s gift resided not only in capturing the precise instant of an action, but to evoke the spirit of the moment, telling a story in a single image while allowing the viewer to infer what was beyond the frame.

To see more of Marc Riboud’s splendid photographs, and learn more about his life and legacy, visit his official web page:  http://marcriboud.com/portfolio/ 

Sources: MarcRiboud.com, FranceCulture.fr, Wikipedia.