Marie-Laure de Decker, photojournalist and former war reporter, is dead

2023-07-15 17:59:38
Marie-Laure de Decker, during the 18th International Festival of Photojournalism “Visa pour l’image”, in Perpignan, September 6, 2006. ERIC CABANIS / AFP

Photojournalist and former war reporter Marie-Laure de Decker died on Saturday July 15 at the age of 75, according to information communicated by the family to Agence France-Presse and the Monde. She died following a long illness in a hospital in Toulouse, near the house in Tarn where she had lived for several years.

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Native of Bône (today Annaba in Algeria), she started as a model, before going to the other side of the lens by immortalizing artists like Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and Philippe Souppault at the end of the 1960s. Passionate about travel and Africa, she left to photograph the Vietnam War with minimal experience and succeeded in her bet.

“I said to myself: people will see that I’m not a real photographer, that I don’t have my own camera, that I only have this old Leica. In fact, I knew afterwards, that old Leica was a marvel”she recounted in a memoir in 1985.

Being a female war reporter hasn’t been 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 was the case in South Africa, we don’t kill you right away, we give you a chance”.

Marie-Laure de Decker will have a career at the Gamma agency, from 1971 until the liquidation of the structure in 2009. By asking to recover her photos, she will only obtain the black and white, not the color, and will lose a lawsuit to have his copyright recognized on the digitized photos.

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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.

The World with AFP