Paris : J.P. Laffont, an American

Every burning issue reflects, as if in the mirror of its spontaneous eruption, a generation of photographers, stunning travelers, and seismographs of the moment. Tomorrow, they will become historians of the ever-growing image memory of the world we live in. They leave us a precious legacy of all the “Turbulent Americas” they experienced. From Guernica to London, Stalingrad, and Berlin, from New York and Washington to Saigon, Kabul, Bagdad, Jerusalem, Aleppo, and Gaza, from Detroit to Luanda—on all the continents they have emerged from anonymity: Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, Larry Burrows, Cartier-Bresson, William Eugene Smith, Sébastião Salgado, James Nachtwey, William Klein… The list could be much longer. From depression to depression, in every theater of war, and at the heart of societies in the midst of a(n) (r)evolution, photographers belong to those “decisive moments,” leaving their mark in the pantheon of photography. Jean-Pierre Laffont belongs among the greats, and far too few of us knew it, apart from Eliane, his wife; Hubert Henrotte, the founder of the agency Gamma, then Sygma; and the great “picture editors” at such magazines as Stern, Match, Time, Newsweek, who regularly printed his cover stories as exclusive magazine spreads.

Jean-Pierre Laffont, completely unobtrusive behind his camera, belongs to the race of true masters of the image. He is pleased that the Maison européenne de la photographie, along with the republication of an already cult book, Le Paradis d’un Photographe, Tumulteuse Amérique, finally puts a spotlight on the rich production of a photographer who had remained for far too long in the shadow of thousands of his images. Full of modesty and humility, Jean-Pierre Laffont is a colossus among the great, persistent figures in a brotherhood of “long-distance reporters.”