Depardon’s Olympic Archive: Japan, 1964
Celebrating the opening of the 30th Summer Olympic Games, Simon Depardon has produced a series of eight short films with his father, Raymond, as he looks back at a vast career of photographing the Olympic Games
In 1964, the first Olympic Games were held in Japan, and marked the first time that the games had taken place in Asia. A young, 22-year-old Raymond Depardon, only three or four years into his career as a photojournalist, traveled to the country to photograph his very first sporting event. Here, he looks back at his first experience photographing the Olympic Games, the importance of patience and reflex in sports photography, and the moment that he photographed his first gold medal for France.
"Taking a good sports photograph is difficult because you have to anticipate. And you have to wait. You have to be well-positioned. You have to place yourself a bit, not too high, place yourself at the right height, wait for them to pass and then… click."
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"The Olympic Games is a very good exercise for a photographer… It makes you work on your reflexes, beyond just the visual. A fraction of a second, like this, suspended…and it’s always very photogenic. "
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"In the end, in cinema or television it goes too fast, and here, in photography, it’s like doing it in slow motion, and at the right moment."
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Depardon recounts the moment that he photographed his first gold medal for France, which was Pierre Jonquères d’Oriola at the very end of the Games. He laughs now as he tells the story: on hearing the opening chords of the Marseillaise, he remembers running onto the out-of-bounds pitch to capture the moment, tailed closely by four or five angry Japanese policemen. “I was very happy to get that shot,” he says.
“Instants Olympiques” is a series of eight videos produced by Raymond Depardon, supported by Ville de Paris and Samsung. The videos coincide with an open-air exhibition dotted across the French capital and featuring 15 images from Depardon’s archive of the Olympic Games.
