2023-07-15 19:04:00
Marie-Laure Decker died after a long illness on Saturday at the age of 75. She notably covered the Vietnam War.
By LL with AFP Marie-Laure de Decker holding her Leica camera in her hands in April 2013. © REMY GABALDA / AFP Published on 07/15/2023 at 7:04 p.m.
Marie-Laure de Decker was a photojournalist. This war reporter died on Saturday at the age of 75, the family learned.
She died after a long illness in a hospital in Toulouse. Native of Bône (now 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 60s 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.
“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 it afterwards, this old Leica was a marvel,” she recounted in a memoir in 1985.
Serge Gainsbourg, Caroline of Monaco, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing….
Being a female war reporter hasn’t been easy — “if you’re a woman you’re never taken seriously” — but on the other hand, she said, “there’s 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”.
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, not the color, 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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