Marc Riboud – Decorated war hero and passionate photographer
Born in Lyon on 24th June 1923, Marc Riboud discovered an important purpose of life in photography at an early age: in 1937, at the young age of 14, he explored the wonders of the World Exhibition in Paris with his father's second-hand Kodak camera. The ‘waistcoat’ or pocket camera he used for his first pictures was also a favourite model for soldiers - and only a few years later, Riboud himself had to go to war when German troops occupied France and he joined the French Resistance. He was honoured with the Croix de guerre in 1945 for his courage and determination. While still a resistance fighter, he began studying mechanical engineering at the École Centrale de Lyon, but only worked as an engineer for a short time, as after meeting the famous war photographers Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson and David Seymour (also known by his pseudonym Chim) in Paris in 1951, he decided to pursue a career as a freelance photographer.
Successful collaboration with the Magnum Agency
Marc Riboud initially pursued his new photographic career on his own, but was invited to join the young photo agency Magnum Photos as early as 1953. Magnum was backed by his patrons Capa, Cartier-Bresson, Chim and George Rodger, who had already become aware of Riboud's great talent during their first meeting in Paris. His work for Magnum took him around the world, particularly to Asia, and he quickly became an expert on the Far East and the photographic documentation of Asian culture. For his haunting images of China during the Mao dictatorship, he sometimes took considerable risks and photographed undercover. His camera enabled him to gain access to secret places, taking portraits of Fidel Castro immediately after the Cuban Missile Crisis and photographing the historic meeting between US President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev. His most famous photo is called La Fille à la fleur and shows a black and white image of an activist holding a flower in her hand and standing in front of heavily armed soldiers.
An unerring eye for special motifs
In 1961, Marc Riboud married the American author, sculptor and illustrator Barbara Chase-Riboud; the marriage lasted almost twenty years and they had two sons. A second marriage to the journalist Catherine Chaine remained childless. In the course of his great career, he did not always seek out the revolutionary political event or the important historical figure: one of his earliest and most famous photographic successes shows a worker painting the Eiffel Tower in Paris at a dizzying height. Marc Riboud's pictures appeared in numerous well-known magazines, including Geo, Life and Paris Match. He has also published several illustrated books on very different subjects - one of his most spectacular books is dedicated to the Chinese Huang Shan mountain range.
Marc Riboud died in Paris on 30th August 2016.
Marc Riboud - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
