In the tender and rigorous eye of Marc Riboud

Marc Riboud, 100 photographs for 100 years

At the Musée des Confluences, until December 31

Lyon (Rhône-Alpes)

From our regional correspondent

He called himself a flâneur, rather than a reporter. The hundred photographs by Marc Riboud, currently exhibited at the Musée des Confluences, in Lyon, recount the great upheavals of the end of the 20th century, in the four corners of the world. The Lyonnais artist, who died on August 30, 2016, was thirsty for elsewhere, but he would have loved to return to his hometown “whose light he appreciated, more than anything”, confides Catherine Chaine Riboud, his wife. The one who is also secretary general of the association Les Amis de Marc Riboud helped the museum for this first exhibition-tribute, devoted to photography thanks to loans from the fund bequeathed to the national museum of Asian arts-Guimet.

The scenography, refined and accessible, immerses us without artifice in a series of shots. As a starting point for this walk, not chronological but cyclical, the young photographer’s desire to travel, from 1953. Marc Riboud, “without any particular project but on the lookout for everything”, decided to point his lens at the details of a changing world. In the 1960s, it is the eyes full of joy of a young woman, the day of the independence of Algeria, the determined fist of this young Beijinger, demonstrating against the war in Vietnam. His work, full of empathy, tells us that to witness a moment is to pay homage to the other, in what is strong, tender or funny: we find ourselves smiling, by example, in front of The Painter of the Eiffel Tower, who seems to dance above the void in the manner of Chaplin. If he cherished “the instinct of the moment”, Marc Riboud also patiently sought beauty, which he found in geometry, like this circle formed by Iranian wrestlers, or in the light “on which he spent hours to work in his laboratory,” explains Marianne Rigaud-Roy, project manager for the exhibition. It is this tender and meticulous photojournalism that the general public is invited to discover, beyond the known clichés, like the Diver in front of the ramparts of Dubrovnik or The Young Girl with a Flower. It is in front of the latter, immortalizing the gesture of a young pacifist in the middle of a demonstration against the Vietnam War, in 1967, that the words of his wife resonate best: “I believe that, in difficult times, such as the one that we live, his work can help to take a peaceful look at the world. »

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