Depardon in America

Born in 1942, Raymond Depardon belonged to the generation that saw America come to the rescue of Europe and then propagate its cultural model after the Second World War. “Everyone was happy to greet the soldiers of the US Army in their GMC cargo trucks, with their stylish fatigues. I remember running with my brother Jean to swap apples from Le Garet farm for chewing gum. Later, in 1952, my godmother, Madeleine Brenon, who was my father’s niece and worked in the clothing industry, was invited to the Levis plant in Wichita Falls, Texas. She brought me back a pair of jeans and a jacket, plus a huge illustrated map of the US that I hung up in my bedroom. I looked at it all the time and in the end, I knew it off by heart. In those days we were completely sold on the American dream. When I had my first darkroom, at the age of 14, I even called it atomic labo, not really knowing the meaning of this word which was fashionable in those Cold War times.”

In 1961, when he was covering the first anniversary of independence in Côte d’Ivoire for the Dalmas agency, Depardon met Robert Kennedy, then Attorney General, who was among the official guests. “At one point he sat on a step to rest and ate an orange. He gave me half and we started talking about his country, notably about the problems of racial segregation. I slipped into the conversation the fact that I was hoping to train as a photojournalist in the United States. He told me to write to him in Washington. A few weeks later, I was sent the address of the Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia, but I never followed up. I had already started something else.”

In fact, Depardon learned his trade on the job. He was obsessed with only one thing: getting his photographs published. He was there to catch ministers after cabinet meetings and on the lookout at lm premieres; he followed sensational news and covered internationally significant events such as the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the war in Algeria, the beginnings of the Vietnam War and the Tokyo Olympics in 1964. Gamma, the agency that he founded with Hubert Henrotte and Hugues Vassal in November 1966, boosted his career.

Depardon was soon joined there by Gilles Caron, and the two men formed a tandem that was unique in French photojournalism. Both men lived to the rhythms of the convulsions of the planet: the Six-Day War, the occupied territories in Palestine, the famine and civil war in Biafra, the rebellion in Chad. “We were fascinated by America, which was very much in the lead in terms of photojournalism. We therefore put in place a system that we called the ‘French Touch’ which was very efficient and innovative, and which consisted in making photos long before this or that magazine got around to commissioning us.”

Elected 37th president of the United States, Richard Nixon declared that he wanted to start the process of withdrawing the American military from Vietnam, but the conflict had now spread into Cambodia. Indeed, it was on a stretch of the road linking the two countries, Route 1, controlled by the Khmer Rouge, that Caron disappeared in April 1970. “We never knew and will never know how Gilles died. We couldn’t bring ourselves to believe it. We were sure that he was going to come back.”

Depardon was in a state of shock. He had lost both a partner and a friend. He was so out of sorts that in winter 1970 the Gamma agency decided to send him to Los Angeles to recover. Staying at the Tropicana Motel on Santa Monica Boulevard, in West Hollywood, he spent three months there making himself numb with work.