Marc Riboud’s early photographs on show in Lyon
Lyon is the birthplace of Marc Riboud, one of France’s greatest living photographers. Now 91, Riboud headed north for Paris about 60 years ago, and his artistic career took off. The city of Lyon is paying tribute to one of its sons who has travelled the world.
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Along the way, with his cameras, Marc Riboud has captured everyday life and historical moments from the 1940s to very recently.
Lorène Duret, who works with Marc Riboud, is the curator. She says it’s Riboud's own nature, but also the guidance he received from friend and mentor, Henri Cartier-Bresson that helped him compose “geometric, but also human and humourous photographs.”
In the exhibition are a couple of photos taken before he entered professional life (he started out as an engineer like many in his family), and also the pocket camera his father gave him which was his first first.
Audio report
About a third of the black and white photos Duret has selected have never been exhibited before. Some of them are from a series taken in Alaska in 1958.
But she also picked some very famous ones like the 1953 composition of a man painting the Eiffel Tower… without any safety harness, elegantly using a paintbrush, wearing overalls, ropes soled espadrilles and a small brimmed painter’s hat. The Palais de Chaillot, which is on the other side of the river Seine, and the buildings of Paris seem as if they are in another world below, in the background.
On show are some of Riboud’s photos of China under Mao, where he photographs workers at lunch in a canteen; in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev - he picks out chess-addicts wrapped up outside in the Moscow winter; beauties in post-war Japan and Yugoslavia, misty silhouettes of trees with canopy-shaped branches of leaves in Darjeeling in India which mimic those of the people sheltered by umbrellas that have the same convex shape.
Toiling workers merge with ship hulls in Turkey, the faces of striking dockers in London fill the frame. Clever stuff and moving. Riboud, a onetime engineer, particularly in his early works, gives factories and shipyards human faces.
The photo of the Russian chess fans, has been hung next to another of the faces of distraught, pressing crowds who have just heard the news of the death of Pope Pius XII and an angelic face at a church altar.
Catherine Riboud, Marc Riboud’s wife, explains how her husband, throughout his career, and up till a few years ago when he was about 88, fed an insatiable curiosity with his travels and photographs, whether taken 5, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 or 60 years ago.
“When he was young, he set off in a landrover and travelled, like a wanderer, not a reporter", she says.
Yet arriving in China in 1957, when no other western photographer was there, having access to factories, his photographic work took on a political and historical value in spite of himself.
Marc Riboud’s photos may be more famous than his name. Some of those taken in the 1970s went around the world like the young woman tenderly holding a flower in a gesture of peace in front of US army troops defending the Pentagon in Washington DC during a protest against the Vietnam war in the 1970s. Or the two women in burkas in front of a poster of the Ayatollah Khomeini in at the time of the Iranian revolution in 1979.
Just to think that the flower-power photo which says so much in an instant was, says Marc Riboud in a short film which is part of the exhibition, the last photo on his last film reel that day.
His photographs may be humorous or melancholic, but like the one in the exhibition taken in Nepal, of children flying their kites on the roof of a temple with the heavily painted eyes of a god just behind them, is full of grace.”
Great photography depends not only on the photographer’s scientific knowledge, skill and art, but also, and it’s certainly true in Marc Riboud’s case, a certain mysteriously frequent serendipity.
Which you can appreciate at the Plateau, Conseil Régional de la Region Rhône-Alpes in Lyon until February 2015.
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