A leading photojournalist of the second half of the twentieth century, Marc Riboud embodies the socially engaged photographer who avoids the spectacle of high-profile news events to uncover the flashes of human drama in the undercurrents of everyday life. He has spent five decades – about half of it as a member of the Magnum photo agency – documenting social, political and economic conditions in dozens of countries on several continents, but much of his reputation rests on his work in Asia. From Turkey to Japan, he has revealed the changing face of that continent, particularly in China, where he has returned repeatedly since 1957 to compile an extraordinary visual record of the country, from the Great Leap Forward through the Cultural Revolution to the Tiananmen Square protests and the turn to capitalism.
Born in Lyon, France, in 1923, Riboud took his first photographs as a child. Photographing the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1937 with his father’s Kodak Vest Pocket camera, Riboud made an early connection between the medium and his interaction with other cultures.
After fighting with the French Resistance in the Second World War, he studied engineering and worked for three years in a factory in Lyon before turning to professional photography. In 1952 he met Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa, two of the founders of Magnum Photos, and joined the agency the following year. Cartier-Bresson would have a strong influence on Riboud’s style and working methods, although Riboud’s photographs initially tended towards the carefree style of fellow Parisian Robert Doisneau and the weekly leisure magazines. Paris, 1953 [Painter of the Eiffel Tower], an image from Riboud’s first paid assignment for Life magazine, reflects this in its light-hearted treatment of a quintessentially Parisian subject. The painter floats above the city with comic grace, at one with the monument to which he clings, like a music hall acrobat nostalgically transported from a Belle Epoque revue.
Cartier-Bresson advocated a less sentimental, more complex narrative style, based on capturing the ‘decisive moment’, which crystallises a scene at a key moment, often open to multiple interpretations. France, 1953 [Pilgrimage to Chartres] is an early example of Riboud’s turn in this direction. Taken during a religious retreat in Chartres, it reveals his enduring interest in the individual as inscribed – yet distanced – from society and its main institutions of power. In the foreground, a young woman confesses to a priest in a makeshift confessional, while a crowd of churchgoers gathers in the field behind her. Despite the bucolic setting, there is a palpable tension in the composition, as the collective power of the Catholic Church seen on either side of the woman contrasts sharply with her deeply personal reflection.
Riboud began working internationally in 1955, and made his first visit to China in 1957, at a time when the country was generally closed to Westerners.
Although he has since worked only occasionally in France, China has remained an inexhaustible source of interest. His early China photographs, such as Beijing, 1965 [Antiques Dealer], capture a country still caught between communism and the vestiges of dynastic tradition. Here, shop windows divide the street life outside into a neat triptych of past, present and future: three elderly jade merchants lounge on the steps of their shop in the centre, while two women with children chat on the left and a teenage girl in a Mao-style school jacket turns cautiously towards the camera from the right. Beijing, 1965 [Divorce Proceedings] has a similar symmetry, although here it is a government tribunal that comes between a private couple to pass public judgement under the gaze of Mao’s official portrait.
Much of Riboud’s work in the last decades of the century in China captures the uneasy balance between communism and emerging capitalism, juxtaposing coal miners and heavy industry with consumer culture and advertising. In a scary twist, in Shanghai, 1993 [shopping street], Mao’s official portrait reappears, but this time in a busy shopping street, sharing wall space with a glamour shot of American icon Elvis Presley, each an airbrushed icon of aging cults.
Throughout much of the 1960s and 70s, Riboud covered armed conflict and social upheaval, from the wars in Algeria and Vietnam to the student uprisings in Paris and the Islamic revolution in Iran. Avoiding sensationalist depictions of violence, his work from this period often focuses on the resistance and actions of the general population as a result of such events. In this vein, Washington, 1967 [Girl with Flower] became an emblematic image of the American peace movement, depicting a young woman at an anti-war demonstration raising a white daisy to the thrusting bayonets of a line of soldiers. The diffuse light and long focal length give the event a tender, romantic feel that belies the action. His relationship with China earned Riboud a desirable press visa to North Vietnam in 1968, and his subsequent photographs of Ho Chi Minh were circulated worldwide as proof that the Vietnamese leader was still alive.
While Riboud’s work often has an immediate, almost snapshot quality that gives it a sense of transparent testimony, he has also made images of a more abstract and timeless quality. The silhouettes of two boys playing at dusk in Ghana, 1961 [the beach in Accra], for example, merge into a choreographed figure against a backdrop that gives little indication of place or date. Since leaving Magnum to work freelance in 1979, Riboud has broadened his range to include work of a more painterly and spiritual tone, including a series on the Angkor temples of Cambodia and another on the Huang Shan mountains of China. His Huang Shan photographs, published in Capital of Heaven, use colour rather than his usual black and white to create misty blue-grey images of rounded peaks that evoke the ghostly landscapes of classical Chinese scroll paintings.
In addition to his photography, Riboud played a central role in the management and development of Magnum in the 1960s and 1970s, serving as the agency’s European vice-president for 14 years from 1959 and as president in 1975. Overseeing the agency’s growth while mediating disputes between its independent-minded members, Riboud became an important link between those who founded the agency in 1947 and the next generation of members who would take Magnum into the twenty-first century. He also helped broaden the appeal of photojournalism beyond the confines of the news media by being one of the first photographers to integrate reporting assignments with gallery and museum exhibitions, and by regularly publishing collections of his work since 1959. This practice promoted the news photograph as an image of aesthetic consequence, potentially transcending the circumstances of its creation, but it also raised the precarious question of the role of subjectivity in journalistic practice.
In 2011, Marc Riboud made a donation of 192 original prints made between 1953 and 1977 to the National Museum of Modern Art (Centre Georges Pompidou) in Paris. His work has won prestigious awards and is exhibited in museums and galleries in Paris, New York, Shanghai, Tokyo, etc.
Marc Riboud passed away in Paris, at 93 years old, on August 30th 2016. The core of his archives has been donated to Guimet National Asian Arts Museum, Paris, in 2019.
