Alizé Le Maoult, Through their eyes…

Every Friday, for 10 consecutive weeks, The Eye of Photography is publishing one of the 34 portraits of war photographers taken by Alizé Le Maoult. This week, we honor Yan Morvan, from France.

Yan Morvan was born in Paris in 1954. In 1974, he published his first photograph in the daily newspaper Libération. In 1977 appeared his first book on the black jackets, entitled Le Cuir et le Baston. He then joined the Paris Match team, then the Figaro Magazine until 1980. From 1980 to 1988, he joined the Sipa agency and became permanent correspondent of the American weekly Newsweek, covering the main conflicts: Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, Philippines, Afghanistan, Mozambique, Rwanda, Kosovo … A freelance photographer since 1988, he regularly collaborates with most major international publications.

I had never really met Yan Morvan before taking his portrait. We came across several times but we only exchanged a few words. I knew his remarkable work about the « battlefields » and the one about « les Blousons noirs », French bikers with which one he had started as a photographer. I wanted to make his portrait since a long time. His Celt identity like me made him to me nice. But his stature, his tough personality had probably intimidated me and probably keeping me at a distance… Then one day in June 2016, we met in a café near Place de Clichy in Paris. Yan was leaving for China the day after. Besides his busy schedule, he gave me the right time. We wandered together in the streets around, looking for the most interesting walls. Yan played the game, and I did not have as many options for a portrait. Behing his glasses and under the black leather jacket, I discovered a warm, generous man, with a atypical route and a rare sensibility.

In a few words, Yan Morvan explains the choice of his photograph that for him symbolizes war: “I just want the silence, only silence. To listen to the sound of the wind, the song of the birds, as the lapping of waves. To travel from one country to the other, to forget time. In a war zone life ends and begins, again in the clamor and thunder of war. Here calm has decended.”