2023-07-16 11:22:30
Marie-Laure de Decker’s career has notably taken her to Vietnam and Chad. She has also produced portraits of personalities, from Man Ray to Serge Gainsbourg.
Photojournalist Marie-Laure de Decker, who had been a war reporter, died on Saturday at the age of 75, AFP learned from the family. She succumbed to the aftermath of a long illness in a hospital in Toulouse.
Native of Bône (today Annaba, in Algeria), she started as a model, before wanting to go to the other side of the lens, immortalizing at the end of the 1960s artists like Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and Philippe Soupault.
Passionate about travel and Africa, she left to photograph the Vietnam War with minimal experience. But she succeeds in her bet.
“There is an advantage to being a woman: you are not killed right away”
“I said to myself: people will see that I’m not a real photographer, that I don’t have a camera of my own, that I only have this old Leica. In fact, I knew it afterwards, this old Leica was a marvel,” she recounted in a memoir in 1985.
Being a female war reporter was not easy – “If you are a woman you are never taken seriously” – but on the other hand, she said, “there is an advantage to being a woman, as this was the case in South Africa, we don’t kill you right away, we give you a chance”.
She had “immortalized part of the history of Chad”
The President of the African Union Commission, Chadian Moussa Faki, paid tribute to her on Twitter, noting that, “through her images”, she had “immortalized part of the history of Chad”.
She will make a career at the Gamma agency, from 1971 until its liquidation in 2009. The story will end badly: asking to recover her photos, she will only get the black and white ones, not the color ones, and will lose a lawsuit to have his copyright recognized on the digitized photos.
She is also known for having photographed personalities such as Serge Gainsbourg, Caroline of Monaco or President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, learning on television of his 1974 presidential victory. She had two sons, including one with lawyer Thierry Lévy.
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