The French photographer Marie-Laure de Decker, who has died aged 75 of coronary heart failure, was one of many first girls to gatecrash the male-dominated world of photojournalism. As a younger girl she endured being in entrance of the lens, as a mannequin, to assist her meet her objective: to be behind it. She needed to struggle to succeed, and mentioned: “If you happen to’re a lady you’re by no means taken significantly.” But she reported from the Vietnam conflict, the battle for independence in Mozambique, riots in Chile and the oppression of apartheid in South Africa.
She didn’t {photograph} the horrors that she witnessed. As an alternative, she introduced her compassionate eye to bear on the victims of battle: the displaced aged, combatants in quiet moments, girls and kids. She mentioned: “I’m proud to not present blood. I censor myself as quickly because the shot is taken. I’ve ethical ideas.”
She had a deep love for Africa, having been born within the then French colony of Algeria. Arriving in Chad in 1975, she met the Toubou rebels combating towards the Chadian and French armies. She lived with them for 2 years within the coronary heart of the Sahara, taking black and white portraits of the fighters posing proudly. “Color is rarely as lovely as in actual life, so it’s in black and white that folks’s souls present,” she mentioned. De Decker walked and suffered with the Toubou they usually revered her, embraced her and renamed her “Marie de l’or”: Mary of Gold.
The youngest of three sisters, Marie-Laure was born within the Algerian metropolis of Bône (now Annaba), to French mother and father, Michel de Decker and Marie-Antoinette (nee Le Sourd). Michel was a conflict hero, having fought within the Spanish civil conflict and the second world conflict. Later he discovered work within the French colonies, together with taking his household to spend a yr in a distant village in Ivory Coast, the place he looked for gold.
They moved to Paris, the place Marie-Laure attended boarding faculty and spent her free time within the Louvre museum, the one place she was allowed to go to unaccompanied. College was not for her, and she or he dropped out at 15. She enrolled at Penninghen College of Artwork in 1963 and found freedom and images. With piercing inexperienced eyes and a noble magnificence, she reluctantly turned to modelling to earn cash. On the cinema, she noticed the Oscar-winning documentary The Anderson Platoon, about an American unit within the jungles of Vietnam, and was impressed.
After a short flirtation with film-making, she selected images. She admired the braveness and storytelling of the photojournalist Gilles Caron of the younger French picture company, Gamma, and she or he resolved to hitch it.
Pals lent her Leica cameras, and she or he shot the Could 68 Paris protests and took a sequence of portraits of her heroes, the forgotten males of surrealism. She tracked down Man Ray, Luis Buñuel and Marcel Duchamp and took her work to {a magazine} editor who instructed her: “Come again once they’re lifeless.”
Undeterred, she saved up her modelling charges and acquired her personal Leica and, in 1970, aged 23, a one-way ticket to Saigon. There she labored for the US journal Newsweek for 2 years, travelling across the nation on a motorcycle with a Vietnamese buddy, named “Twiggy” after the thin British mannequin.
On her return to Paris she was accepted into Gamma. De Decker was the company’s sole feminine photographer and, when she arrived, one man requested if she was there to do the cleansing. She felt “very despised. I used to be surrounded by macho photographers who thought they had been being intelligent.” However she was brave and decided. She took portraits of politicians; most famously of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing watching himself win the 1974 election on tv (he subsequently wooed her desperately, regardless of their ideological variations); and celebrities resembling Charlotte Rampling and François Truffaut. She reported from Yemen and Bolivia after which, in 1975, she went to Chad.
Whereas staying with the Toubou rebels, she and a fellow photographer, Raymond Depardon, had been instrumental in securing the discharge of a French hostage, the archaeologist Françoise Claustre, and the ladies remained pals. De Decker additionally frolicked with the Wodaabe tribe, nomadic cattle herders within the south of the nation, “individuals who love one another, who don’t have anything to do with our world. They produce what they want and use solely what they’ll grasp. It’s the whole reverse of us.” Though she had 50 rolls of movie seized by the French military – the return of which she sought unsuccessfully – a guide of her work, Pour Le Tchad, was revealed in 1978.
In 1980, following work in Mozambique, Russia and Tibet, she left Gamma. Her early enthusiasm for the company had gone, and she or he needed to be unbiased: “I need to {photograph} solely those I really like.”
In Paris, she had met Teo Saavedra, a Chilean revolutionary, and their son, Pablo, was born in 1983. Later that yr, the couple travelled to Santiago: Teo organised assaults with the armed resistance, De Decker documented unrest throughout the tenth anniversary of Pinochet’s coup.
She shot style for Glamour and Harpers & Queen magazines and took memorable portraits of Serge Gainsbourg and Catherine Deneuve. De Decker visited South Africa in 1985, and would return there often, recording the struggles of bizarre individuals residing underneath the brutal yoke of apartheid.
In 1986, now separated from Teo, she met the prison defence lawyer Thierry Lévy, they usually had a son, Balthazar, the next yr. Collectively they revealed a guide, Garçons et Filles, in 1987, her portraits from world wide accompanied by his textual content, and she or he continued to work, taking pictures for shoppers together with Yves Saint Laurent. Then, in 1993, she travelled to Bosnia to cowl the civil conflict. It was a mistake. She later mentioned: “Since Bosnia, there’s a facet of my job I can’t stand. Bosnia was too unhappy, too onerous. It killed me.”
She retreated to Rabastens, on the river Tarn, a spot she knew and liked from childhood. Till 2007, when her well being was affected after a automotive accident in Chad, she took her boys to go to the Wodaabe individuals yearly. She needed to document the tribe’s tradition and have a good time their lives: “They’re individuals I love, and I’ve determined to {photograph} each face.”
In 2001, the primary main exhibition of her work, Vivre Pour Voir, opened at MEP (the Maison Européenne de la Photographie) in Paris, with one other present on the Visa Pour l’picture competition in Perpignan in 2006. When Gamma folded in 2009, De Decker grew to become embroiled in authorized battles to try to have her materials and copyright restored to her. The circumstances had been lengthy and arduous, and left a bitter style.
In 2013, her excellent work depicting the realities of conflict was acknowledged with the Albert Kahn Worldwide Planet prize.
Levy died in 2017. De Decker is survived by her sons.
