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Eighty black-and-white prints from the Vietnam War and the Munich Olympics hostage crisis bear witness to the career of the French photographer, who lived through the golden age of photo agencies before turning to more documentary work and cinema.
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At 84, it was a first for Raymond Depardon: he had never before participated in photojournalism festival Visa Pour l'Image. Now among the most respected French photographers, he finally found himself exhibited among his peers at the Église des Dominicains in Perpignan, southern France, with photographs from his days as a reporter. From the Vietnam War to the conflict in Lebanon and the Munich Olympic hostage crisis, more than 80 black-and-white prints richly evoke the journey of one of the last giants of the golden age of photo agencies.
That period spanned from his first experiences in the early 1960s to the early 1980s, when he shifted toward more documentary photography and cinema. But why such a long absence from Perpignan? "We're still trying to untangle the reasons," admitted his son Simon. "I don't think photo festivals were my cup of tea," Depardon himself added. "With Gilles Caron, my great partner with whom I co-founded [photo agency] Gamma, we used to avoid awards, fearing they'd bring us bad luck."
When Caron disappeared tragically in Cambodia in 1970, "that brought everything to a halt for me," Depardon murmured. "It was as if we had gone too far." Still, he tried by all means to "maintain the Gamma spirit": he continued to work on subjects that mattered to him, "notably decolonization, which hardly anyone was covering, or the US, which fascinated us all at the time, and which I tried to look at beyond the fantasy. During those years, from 1965 to 1975, agencies were fiercely competitive, and there were many truly great photos."
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