Description

Raymond Depardon, born in France in 1942, began taking photographs on his family farm in Garet at the age of 12. Apprenticed to a photographer-optician in Villefranche-sur-Saône, he left for Paris in 1958. He joined the Dalmas agency in Paris in 1960 as a reporter, and in 1966 he co-founded the Gamma agency, reporting from all over the world. From 1974 to 1977, as a photographer and filmmaker, he covered the kidnap of a French ethnologist, François Claustre, in northern Chad. Alongside his photographic career, he began to make documentary films: 1974, Une Partie de Campagne and San Clemente. In 1978, Depardon joined Magnum. During his time stationed in Africa, Depardon produced some breathtaking landscape imagery, as well as documenting the diverse peoples of the continent. “I wanted to suffocate standing before vast Africa, to find myself overcome, on the side of the road where our car would break down, for days, to remain silent and to listen.”

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