Enjoy Life in 1/125 Second
Marc Riboud takes three steps at a time and runs down two floors on the spiralling wooden stairs to meet me. Rue Monsieur Le Prince, 6th arrondissement, Paris. Every visitor of the house is given a guided tour, a brief account of its checkered history. The house has witnessed the French revolution. At that time, the street it is located on was briefly named Rue de la Libertė. On 24 June 2008, Marc Riboud celebrated his 85th birthday here.
In the house’s second backyard, he tells some saucy details. In the small apartments with a front garden, high-ranking government officials received their mistresses in former times. Is this still going on today? A mischievous smile is the answer.
Marc Riboud tackles the events, he wants to capture them with his cameras. His self-confessed obsession is to turn the most powerful moments of life into photographs. He likes to get close; hands and faces of people feature prominently in many of his photographs, that is, only centimeters away from his lens – they could touch him while he takes the photograph.
“Washington, D.C., 21 October 1967. While taking part in a march for peace in Vietnam outside the Pentagon, Jane Rose Kasmir shows a beautiful face of the American youth.” This is the subtitle of one of Riboud’s most famous photographs. To the left, the leather gloves and bayonets of the National Guard, to the right, this enraptured young woman with a flower close to her face. Riboud does not picture the fight of the ideologies, government power versus peace movement, he finds a brief moment of poetry in politics. As a result, he creates a picture telling of an entire generation and remaining in the memory of mankind. He was a member of the Magnum photographers’ agency, in earlier days he cooperated with Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa and a handful of outstanding reporters. They all were witnesses of the major events of the 20th century.
Riboud liked to photograph people in situations of social upheaval, when emotions were running high – because this produced pictures which were up to his ideas. Intensity is his credo, but independence is as important to him. After WW II and the Résistance, he was a student of civil engineering, worked in a factory for three years, went on vacation in 1951, took photos of a theater festival in his hometown of Lyons and “forgot” to return. He has been on the move to this day, at first in the big cities of Europe and New York. There, he discovers photography in the big museums. Nothing can keep him any longer and he sets out on major journeys. Heading for India in a Land Rover, across China during the Cultural Revolution, in the cold-war Soviet Union for months, then, in 1960, to witness the struggles for independence in Africa, Cambodia, Vietnam. Back in Paris, at the time of the May of ’68, again China, later on the United States – up to this day, Riboud does not go anywhere in the world without at least one camera. He “enjoys life in 1/125 second” – the shutter speed to capture fleeting movements.
One room of Riboud’s spacious apartment is reserved for the legend. Half a century is preserved in countless grey, precisely labelled cardboard boxes. An archive of major moments maintained by diligent assistants. Riboud’s eyes sparkle behind his big glasses which he wears at home. He is tanned and quick on his legs, snaps at an assistant who does not know where the box labelled “Huang Chan, China” is, but calms down quickly because the assistant is new in the realm of pictures. His white, untamed hair suits him. It is the sign of a free spirit. He may be called an artist -“si vous voulez”, but he rejects the affectations of the art market. He favors qualities, mainly those of human behavior, which are at least as important to him as his visual passion.
He likes to sell good, new enlargements of his pictures. But the old, black-and-white originals from which prints were also made are reserved for his children. A moving heritage, these vintage prints made from the just developed film shortly after the pictures were taken. One of them shows Zazou who, totally relaxed, paints the Eiffel Tower. Riboud was dizzy up there, but the picture appeared in Life Magazine and Riboud was in business.
My tribute to Marc Riboud: Two great books and the camera I used, when I tryed to take pictures like him…Here you get an overview of all the great books, like the one I love most: Capital of Heaven, about the mountains of Huang Shan in China.
He likes to sell good, new enlargements of his pictures. But the old, black-and-white originals from which prints were also made are reserved for his children. A moving heritage, these vintage prints made from the just developed film shortly after the pictures were taken. One of them shows Zazou who, totally relaxed, paints the Eiffel Tower. Riboud was dizzy up there, but the picture appeared in Life Magazine and Riboud was in business.
My tribute to Marc Riboud: Two great books and the camera I used, when I tryed to take pictures like him…Here you get an overview of all the great books, like the one I love most: Capital of Heaven, about the mountains of Huang Shan in China.Sometimes, he changes the subject, falls silent and is somewhat lost in the impressions which surround the pictures, maybe in the off sounds and smells which only he is aware of. To him, photographs are no mere construed ideas, because the eye is there to see, not to think.
Riboud’s portraits add a sensual dimension to our knowledge of the great personalities of world history. Sartre, Malraux, Mao, Churchill, never set up, always live, intensive; and when something is wrong and artificial, it is clearly to detect in black and white. For instance, with De Gaulle who was not one of Riboud’s favorites. To the young May of ‘68 revolutionaries, he was a long-nosed caricature. Riboud was there – his emphatic pictures of street fighting, discussions and movements in Paris where on show near his apartment in Place de la Sorbonne, outside in the street, for everybody to look at. This is were France´s intellectual heart beats, this is where the students, major publishing houses and bookstores are. Riboud is at the center of it, but his packed bag is placed beside the entrance door of his apartment. He is on the move, down the stairs in large steps, to the Metro, to the train station and into the world, to make preparations for the next exhibition. There will be many in the next years.
Riboud’s portraits add a sensual dimension to our knowledge of the great personalities of world history. Sartre, Malraux, Mao, Churchill, never set up, always live, intensive; and when something is wrong and artificial, it is clearly to detect in black and white. For instance, with De Gaulle who was not one of Riboud’s favorites. To the young May of ‘68 revolutionaries, he was a long-nosed caricature. Riboud was there – his emphatic pictures of street fighting, discussions and movements in Paris where on show near his apartment in Place de la Sorbonne, outside in the street, for everybody to look at. This is were France´s intellectual heart beats, this is where the students, major publishing houses and bookstores are. Riboud is at the center of it, but his packed bag is placed beside the entrance door of his apartment. He is on the move, down the stairs in large steps, to the Metro, to the train station and into the world, to make preparations for the next exhibition. There will be many in the next years.
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