"The Photographs I Love" 4 – Marc Riboud

“More than a job for me, photography has always been a passion, a passion close to obsession.”
(Marc Riboud)

 

France, 2006

The fourth photo chosen is by Marc Riboud. 

The French photographer born in 1923 in Lyon.

 

Marc Riboud

He started shooting from a young age with a Pocket Kodak given to him by his father.

He took part in the war in France when he was 17.

In Paris he met Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa, the founders of the Magnum agency, which he joined a year later, in the 1950s.

After publishing his photographs in LIFE, he begins years of travel and reportage that will take him to Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, where he stays for a year, until he arrives in China, and then in Japan, in 1958.

 

Riboud is always in the right place at the right time: from the liberation struggles in Africa, in Soweto, in the 1960s, to the independence of Algeria in 1962, to New Delhi in 1964 during the funeral of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, up to the China of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution.

 

Tehran, 1979

“Young bonze in Angkor”. Cambodia, 1992

But the image that made him famous all over the world was taken in 1967, in Washington, during a pacifist demonstration in front of the Pentagon, against the war in Vietnam.

It was on that occasion that he photographed 17-year-old Jan Rose Kasmir handing a flower to the soldiers, a photo titled “Jeune fille à la fleur” (the girl with the flower), which he himself describes as:
“The symbol of American youth: a flower against bayonets.”

 

“The girl with the flower”. Washington, 1967

Among his latest works was the testimony of Barack Obama's victory as president in 2008.

He was one of the main exponents of Magnum, of which he was vice president in Europe for 14 years, and then president in 1975. But then he left it, because according to him he had taken a path towards the search for the fame he did not share.

He always carried two Leica M6s, one loaded with black and white film for his shots and one in color for magazines.

Marc Riboud died in Paris in 2016.

 

The “Girl with the Flower” is undeniably a beautiful and meaningful photo, but his photo I love the most is an unrecognized one, taken in France in 2006.

They are two branches of two plants that meet, linked suspended in the air.

There are descriptive images and other poetic ones, and like poetry also photos can be evocative, suggestive, capable of “suggesting” rather than “saying”.

 

It was one of the first photos I met, when I was leafing through photography books, at the beginning, to try to get to know authors and styles.

I don't know why, but from the first glance I was fascinated by it, and I still carry it with me in my heart and in my eyes.

I don't hide the fact that, when I took my two plants in love, in Malaysia, I had Riboud's photo perfectly in front of me.

 

"The Lovers". MALAYSIA – 22 June 2019 

 

After all, photography, like every area of art, is nourished by suggestions, inspirations, quotes and interpretations.

Everything mixes within us, then it is up to our ability to make our own style and not a mere imitation.

I don't feel that I have imitated him, but that I have sprinkled the water of his poetry in my plants.

Then everyone sees what he wants in his photograph; I think I could draw up a long list of metaphors that come to mind looking at it.

I know, for sure, that from the first time I never saw just two branches joining, but more.

 

It's precisely this possibility of making us to “see more” from what it simply shows, one of the magic of great photographs.

Not everyone succeeds. Marc Riboud did it in an extraordinarily simple way.

 

It reminds me of the sweet lines of a poem by Nazim Hikmet:

“My soul, 

close your eyes 

slowly 

you abandoned as over my arms, 

do not forget me in your sleep, 

close your eyes slowly, 

your brown eyes 

where a flame burns green, 

my soul.” 

(1948) 

Beijing, 1965

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“Marc Riboud” (FotoNote \ Contrasto, 2008)

Italian version