Marc Riboud is a gentleman as gracious as the name of the street where he lives. When I pay Marc a visit, alone or in the company of Chinese photographer friends, I always enjoy the uphill walk in this Latin Quarter, siege of the famous barricades of May 1968 (*1) along the “Rue Monsieur Le Prince”, thinking with delight at the coincidence of the two names and relishing the pleasure of our upcoming conversation. And because of Marc’s righteousness for certain causes and of his unbending and noble love of freedom and independence, I say to myself each time: here I am, about to visit Monsieur Le Prince of Photography.
From as early as his first successful great picture, The Painter of the Eiffel Tower, Marc seemed to have defined his photography as “the pleasure to see”, to wander aimlessly and to capture the world by instinct. He would say that he is no philosopher or sociologist and that he simply looks at the surface of things. Yet this apparent pretense to a certain lightness of being did not stop him from producing a series of powerful pictures that challenge the viewer to observe and to think; such as his reportages on Africa, North Vietnam, on the Iranian revolution, the Algerian independence, and the anti-war campaign in the USA. Yes, Marc Riboud’s art cannot be more explicit as here in this little flower held out in both hands by a young girl to the gun-toting soldiers; a moment of magic and poetry, of peace and love, in the midst of a most dramatic and potentially violent confrontation: that was Marc’s “instinctive moment” (*2).
Over nearly 60 years of making pictures, it is his China photography that really makes up his seminal body of work. Following in the footsteps of Robert Capa (1938) and Henri Cartier-Bresson (1949), from the end of 1956 until 2006, Marc Riboud has visited China some 21 times, achieving a frequency of quasi annual pilgrimages during the 1980’s and the 1990’s. This is the country he has photographed more than any other world photographers without speaking the language, or becoming a sinologist. Marc has always insisted on remaining an outsider in order to keep a fresh eye and be “ready for surprises”. His favorite subject, the Yellow Mountain, stands out as the metaphor of Marc’s fascination with China. “I thought it would have been easy to photograph landscape.” “Not so.” He would say. “The landscape on Huangshan keeps changing so fast. With the haze, the clouds and the lights constantly on the move, you have to stay alert, chasing after the shades. In the end it is really tiring but so satisfying, and so gratifying.” This description fits perfectly with the different and changing faces of the vast land of China he has crisscrossed and captured. From the Northeast steppe to the Southern rice fields, from the Anshan’s industrial zone to Shenzhen’s boom town, from the East coast to the Himalaya chains. Marc has always been chasing after the lights and the shades of China and its people, producing an impressive and unprecedented composite portrait of a country on a 50-year rise.
Obviously Marc does not only look at China through his lenses. He has over the years made many friends, photographers or not. As much as he was fortunate to have had such mentors as Cartier-Bresson and Capa, he has tried in his way to perpetuate this tradition of “passeur”, for example in his remarkable relationship with the Yunnan photographer Wu Jialin. With one not speaking a word of Chinese, and the other not a word of anything but Chinese, they have developed a close exchange over 17 years. While Marc has been guiding and nurturing Wu Jialin into maturity, through Wu’s pictures Marc has been able to keep himself constantly updated with images of the heartland of China and of its mountain folks in his mind and in his heart.
This China retrospective is a unique opportunity to measure out the steps and the journey of a giant in photography, a chance for everyone to grasp the importance of a vision of the world and of China (50% of the prints of this retrospective are about China) by a master who equates his picture taking to the daily practice of a musician.
It is also a training course for our eyes, a lesson in “seeing”. The fact that Marc wanted one of his favorite pictures to feature as the cover of this exhibition’s catalogue, specifically the one with the lightning struck eyes of an enigmatic Bratislava man from a huge outdoor advertisement, is an illustration of the combination of structural, quasi geometric sensibility and an instinctive perception of unusual grace - even beauty (*3) which characterizes the classicism and the modernity of this Prince of photography, and a heartfelt invite from Marc for us to learn to see.
Merci, Monsieur Marc Riboud!
Jean Loh
Curator
(*1) May 1968 which Marc has covered, published in a book “Sous les Pavés” ed La Dispute, 2008 with some 60 pictures
(*2) Anti-war march in Washington 1967. Marc Riboud was the only photographer left at the scene to capture this iconic moment after a long day of confrontation. He ran out of black & white films and took up a second camera which was loaded with color negatives for a last shot. This unpublished color shot was rediscovered recently and displayed at the occasion of his 50-year retrospective at the Musée de la Vie Romantique in Paris 2009
(*3) Described as “punctum” by Roland Barthes in La Chambre Claire, 1980
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