Raymond Depardon

Le Garet and the first assignments

Raymond Depardon was born on 6 July 1942 in Villefranche-sur-Saône. At twelve he began photographing life on his parents’ farm at Le Garet. An apprenticeship with a local photographer and optician preceded his departure for Paris in 1958. By 1960 he was working for the Dalmas agency. An assignment in the Sahara brought his pictures to a wide audience while he was still a teenager.

From Gamma to Magnum

In 1966 he co-founded Gamma. Reporting took him to Chile, Chad and the Olympic Games. In northern Chad he photographed and filmed the French ethnologist Françoise Claustre during her captivity. At home, he filmed Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s 1974 presidential campaign from inside the candidate’s entourage. He began working with Magnum Photos at the end of the 1970s.

His assignments repeatedly took him back to places he had photographed before. He knew Beirut as a Mediterranean city in 1965 and returned during the civil war in 1978. In Chile in 1971 he travelled with Robert Pledge from the celebrations around Salvador Allende in Santiago to farming communities in the south. When Libération sent him to the Berlin Wall in November 1989, he could remember the streets around Bernauer Strasse from his photographs of the early 1960s.

The making of the news

In Numéros zéro (1977) Raymond Depardon joined the staff preparing to launch Le Matin de Paris. The work of making the newspaper became the subject of the film. His earlier film inside Giscard d’Estaing’s campaign, 1974, une partie de campagne, had a very different public life. Audiences had to wait until 2002 to see it in cinemas.

Photographs in the first person

In Notes (1979), Raymond Depardon placed his own writing alongside photographs made on assignment. In 1981 he sent a photograph and a short text from New York to the daily newspaper Libération. The entries became Correspondance new-yorkaise. The same year, his film Reporters followed Parisian press photographers on their rounds. In 1984 the French national photographic survey commissioned by DATAR brought him back to the landscape around his family farm.

The making and selection of photographs also entered his films. He and Roger Ikhlef made Les Années déclic for the Rencontres de la photographie in Arles in 1984. In the third episode of the first volume of Contacts, the series conceived by William Klein, Raymond Depardon comments on his own work. Hearing the photographer alongside the sequence of pictures opens a different route into the archive from seeing a single image in print.

A camera inside an institution

While photographing psychiatric hospitals in Italy, Raymond Depardon worked with the psychiatrist Franco Basaglia. He went on to make San Clemente with Sophie Ristelhueber on the Venetian island that housed a psychiatric hospital. In Faits divers (1983), he spent time with police officers in Paris’s fifth arrondissement. The length of a shift and the wait for a call gave that film its rhythm.

Filming with Claudine Nougaret

Raymond Depardon and sound recordist Claudine Nougaret began working together in the 1980s. On Urgences they worked in the psychiatric emergency department of the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris, Raymond Depardon behind the camera and Nougaret recording sound. They founded the production company Palmeraie et Désert. Their work on French institutions includes Délits flagrants (1994), 10e chambre, instants d’audience (2004) and 12 jours (2017), filmed during hearings for patients in involuntary psychiatric care.

Journeys and fiction

Raymond Depardon and Nougaret made the short film Le Petit Navire together in Mali in 1986. His desert journeys also gave rise to fiction. In La Captive du désert, presented in competition at Cannes in 1990, Sandrine Bonnaire plays a captive in a story informed by his encounters with Françoise Claustre. For Afriques, comment ça va avec la douleur ? he travelled north from Cape Town carrying his own camera. Encounters along the road, including one with Nelson Mandela, gave the film its itinerary.

Returning to the land

Raymond Depardon received the Grand Prix national de la photographie in 1991. In La Ferme du Garet (1995), family pictures and his own photographs tell the story of the place where he grew up. For the film trilogy Profils paysans, he and Nougaret returned over several years to farming families in France. L’Approche (2001), Le Quotidien (2005) and La Vie moderne (2008) follow the changes from one visit to the next.

France, in colour

In 2004 Raymond Depardon set out alone in a camper van with a large-format camera. The resulting survey of French towns and countryside was exhibited at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 2010. In Journal de France (2012), which he and Nougaret co-directed, this journey runs alongside footage from his film archive. The Grand Palais exhibition Un moment si doux (2013-14) traced his use of colour from his earliest assignments to recent journeys.

In 2020 the BnF revisited this shared history from the sound recordist’s position. Following their gift of film and sound archives, the exhibition Claudine Nougaret, dégager l’écoute let visitors listen to how her recordings were made. Raymond Depardon and Nougaret assembled a film for the occasion from extracts of their work together.

The work in recent years

In 2023 the Power Station of Art in Shanghai brought the family farm, rural France and the large-format photographs together in La vie moderne. In Rennes in 2024, Son œil dans ma main placed Raymond Depardon’s photographs of Algeria from 1961 and 2019 alongside writing by Kamel Daoud. That year he received the Prix de la Bibliothèque nationale de France. The Mémorial de la Shoah devoted an exhibition in 2025 to the work he made at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1979. In 2026 the Bourse de Commerce in Paris returned to the colour series La France.