Raymond Depardon, photographer and documentary filmmaker, born in 1942, is a key figure in French photography, appreciated and loved around the world. He discovered photography at a very young age and photographed his childhood farm with his brother’s camera.
At 18, he left to report in the Sahara for the Delmas agency. His published photos on the front page of Paris Match allowed him to make a name for himself. He then covered the war in Algeria. In 1966, he co-founded the Gamma photo agency, which he left in 1979 to join Magnum Photos. He went to Vietnam, Chile, Lebanon, Chad, Afghanistan, He was in New York in 1981 from where he sent a photo every day to the Liberation newspaper. At also made documentary films and notably followed Valéry Giscard d’Estaing during his presidential campaign. This was the beginning of an important series of political portraits. He also produced documentary series on the legal world, the peasant world, the psychiatric hospital, the daily life of the inhabitants of France, for which he traveled throughout the country in a motorhome for five years at the dawn of the 20th century.
He received the national grand prize for photography in 1991, the César for documentary in 1982 with Reporters and again in 1994 with Délits flagrants.
Raymond Depardon exhibited at the European House of Photography, at the BnF, at the Grand Palais, at the Institut du Monde Arabe, at the Mucem in Marseille, at the Rencontres of Arles, of which he was Artistic Director in 2006.
In 2010, he co-founded an independent space in Paris devoted to documentary images, le Bal. Depardon strives to capture everyday life in its authenticity, while claiming a share of subjectivity.
“Raymond Depardon, the discreet and committed witness, who looked at the world almost always in black and white, without stopping to look for the best angle to tell the life of others and that of the world, surprises us again here: with photos of the coast out of season, with a large format camera, in color and reproduced in very large prints exhibited on the beach of Deauville. These images, less known than others, are part of his important work on France, for which he traveled the hexagon and cast his gaze on the territory, on what remains and what will disappear.”
Laura Serani
Le littoral en couleurs de Raymond Depardon
La plage
Planches Contact
Festival de photographie de Deauville
22 October 2022 > 1 January 2023
www.planchescontact.fr
