Raymond Depardon often said that photography saved him. That sometimes you need a camera in your hands to understand. Not to explain—just to stand. The exhibition “Extreme Hotel,” presented in Montpellier, tells that path in color. It tells the story of a life unfolding, a world opening before a young boy who left the farm, who has never stopped looking at people, and above all, talking to them at eye level.
The Extreme Hotel exists. It is a modest establishment in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), invisible to most, except for stubborn travelers. Raymond Depardon spent slow nights there, silent mornings of observation. This unglamorous address is the starting point of the exhibition. It could have been just an anecdote. Instead, it becomes a threshold. A passage between two worlds: the photojournalism of the 1960s and the color that came later—more intimate, more fragile.
The hotel was perfect for Depardon. No heroic décor. No mythology. A room. A window. People passing by. That is how he broke away from the press. And that is how he returns, in this exhibition, to a simpler gaze, almost childlike. “From that window, he watched the street, the life outside, and that gave him ideas,” says Marie Perennès, co-curator of the exhibition with Simon Depardon, Raymond’s son. “When he was a photojournalist for Dalmas, Gamma, then Magnum, he inevitably stayed in international hotels with the other journalists. When he returned for himself in the 1980s and 1990s, he chose these small hotels like the Extreme Hotel. It allowed him to live something else. We think it’s a beautiful metaphor for his relationship to color: it is shaped during the reporting years, but it gains its strength in the curiosity Raymond deploys afterwards, discovering cultures, countries, meeting people across five continents. The title speaks of travel and humanism, which have always defined him.”
Africa
Raymond Depardon was sent to Africa at an age when boys still don’t know who they are. Hardly 18. “When I arrived at the Dalmas agency at the end of the 1950s, they sent me to Africa,” he recalls. “I witnessed the decolonization as a photographer. I was very young, I had not completed secondary school, I had not lived through May ‘68. I was naive.”
He remembers it as an irreversible first time. People touched him, asked: “Are you from Paris?” “They had never seen Parisians,” he says with a smile. Regions familiar with soldiers and engineers had never encountered photographers. In the north of the country, he stayed eight months. He saw only three women. A rare apparition, vertical, elegant. “A woman walking in the street is vertical, an incredible elegance.”
It was not color that captured him, but a rudimentary fraternity. Africa gave him faces, manners of being, bodies subjected to the wind, to politics, to seasons. It educated him. This relationship to “the people”—African, rural, urban—never left him. “Africa marked me. I saw nomads struggling, children, peasants. Like those in France. I knew they suffered. And I thought: we have to make photos to show how they live… I will always defend them.”
Farmers
The Montpellier exhibition opens precisely with rural photographs from France, the farmers we know well from him, but in color this time. “This is a series made in the 2000s,” explains Marie Perennès. “We wanted to begin with it because this return to the land is a reminder of his roots. Raymond often says his first color images were the Ektachromes he made in the farmyard between the ages of 12 and 16, when he took correspondence photography lessons. He photographed the cat, the cow, his brother, his cousin. It’s the beginning of his color vision.”
The medium-format portraits are an homage to rural France, to whom he’s always been intimately. Marcel Privat—one of the farmers filmed in his film La Vie moderne—is now a Tintin specialist. A living tribute. Unlike Depardon’s parents, whom he never dared to photograph. “Everyone told me: ‘You’re annoying us with your camera.’”
You don’t enter a farm unannounced. Farmers push you away, insult you sometimes. “They are never happy.” Depardon went back, again and again. He discovered the middle mountain—neither plain nor summit—the diagonal of emptiness that links the Cévennes to the Massif Central, two beautiful regions of France. In gardens, he noticed family graves. The farms slowly disappeared. Faces faded. And he suddenly understood he was preserving a memory. “I’m happy I photographed them, because they’re no longer there.”
Candy
Depardon’s convictions were forged in black and white, the photographic language of photo agencies and the press. In the sixties, his generation did not value color. Serious photography was black and white. Color belonged to magazine covers, Italian and Spanish publications, commercial imagery. For a long time, he despised color film.
Two cameras, two worlds: one for the agency, the other for a potential cover. “In the beginning, I had two cameras: one black and white, one color. When I had finished the black and white, I would switch to color. So I despised color.” This technical hierarchy became an aesthetic one. The exhibition makes it narrative. Color arrived as a second thought, a sideways step.
Then something shifted. The Japanese invented the vertical format. Suddenly the image was no longer a stage but a frame. Subjects were not placed; lines were discovered. “When Martin Parr arrived at Magnum, there was an uproar. From the purists… At first I didn’t understand. Then the framing changed. Photography shifted.”
Color became sentimental. A happy regression. “Color was the candy of my childhood.” He remembers the pink ones. “There aren’t many pink ones anymore.” The cousins he photographed in Ektachrome in the farmyard. The chewing gum. The road to school on a bicycle.
Color reporter
It took time for Depardon to love color, to work with it for himself. Nevertheless, an entire section of the exhibition is dedicated to his color press work and magazine covers, from politicians to celebrities, from news events to Olympic Games. Pompidou, Nixon, Queen Elizabeth II photographed inside her Rolls-Royce, the terrorists of Munich, athletes in Tokyo. Here, we rediscover his way of bypassing protocol. “I found myself inside the Queen’s Rolls. She looked at me. Today, that would be impossible.” It was crowds, streets, and airplanes that educated him. Simon Depardon speaks of this with precision: “Plane tickets, passports — 24 passports —, publication slips, annotations. It gives a very concrete image of the profession. For example, on a print with Bardot, he wrote ‘300 francs,’ the price of the publication. He always asked for a copy. It’s a goldmine, especially for color, and still widely usable.”
The Pavillon Populaire displays these traces. Magazine spreads, contact sheets, pencil notes, silent double pages, plane tickets, press badges—like those from the Tokyo Olympics—motorcycle goggles. The curators do not mince words: color was a gamble, a chance at a cover. “What if Algeria had been photographed in color?” asks Depardon. “It would have changed everything. Newspapers weren’t in color, only the cover. Slides—we didn’t know whether to give the originals, keep duplicates… Many photos disappeared. An entire generation remained in black and white: McCullin, Gilles Caron, etc. Today, I’ve almost reached peace: not opposing color and black and white. Because if I start opposing them, black and white will win. And that would be terrible.”
This logic also explains the exhibition. One doesn’t just see images. One sees the material conditions of a life: suitcases full of slides, the 2021 fire that destroyed part of the “attic,” the room where Depardon stored his negatives.
Vertical frame
From the 2000s onwards, Depardon returned to the cities he once discovered as a reporter—Tokyo, Moscow, Peru—but without assignments. He worked with a Bronica 4.5×6, a vertical format. He looked for light, flat surfaces, softness, often without a central subject. Many figures are seen from behind, many compositions lack protagonists. “He made color for his pleasure, not to answer a story,” explains Marie Perennès. The exhibition shows this freedom in the large gallery of the Pavillon Populaire. No events. No crisis. No heroes. Almost banal images. Streets, shadows, thresholds. Color is no longer a mission—it is a breath.
A nearby room also presents unpublished color images of Glasgow in 1980, where Depardon traveled twice on assignment for the Sunday Times. He discovered a city scarred by economic crisis, working-class neighborhoods, wastelands. The newspaper refused to publish the photographs, judging them too personal and not documentary enough. Yet this series marks an essential step: color no longer accompanies a subject—it becomes the subject.
Photographing forward
With age comes an inner shift. Depardon got tired of running. He discovered the large-format camera, then the wide American landscape. Geography spoke louder than faces. “I went to poor places, the equivalent of Lozère: the Dakotas, Texas.” He understood slowness, gravity, the idea that seeing is not a moment but a duration. “You stop for a coffee. Above you there’s a water tank, dust. It’s an immense territory. It’s like from here, Montpellier, as far as to Morocco. And Florida is already Marrakech.” The line might seem playful, but it contains everything. Depardon’s land is larger than maps. It links continents through sensation. It does not separate.
In the United States, he found even the tap water more pleasant. “I learned one essential thing: water. The water you develop film in. New York water is very soft, it comes from a huge aqueduct. It changes everything. In France, most photographers use spring water.” The large camera became a refuge. A space where no one interrupts you. At least in America. “In America, you set down your tripod, your black-and-red cloth—the same for two centuries—and you work. Nobody disturbs you. In Vendée (West of France), politicians yelled at me because I was photographing cracked sidewalks. But the sidewalk is part of the shop. It’s commerce. The large camera forces you to look at the ground, the façades, the truth.”
With the camera, Depardon discovered “photographing forward.” “The press means backing away—Bardot, Birkin, premieres, the street. Everything in reverse. At some point, you want to take a photograph walking toward things. The camera allows you to step forward, head first, calmly.”
“After that, I became an ‘artist.’ What a big word.” Fame brought other kinds of commissions. In the early 2000s, Raymond Depardon was offered an 800-square-meter exhibition with pictures of a community where only four or five speakers remained. “Suddenly the contemporary art museums arrived. They’re worse than the Paris Match editors.” For these carte blanche projects, the photographer had almost unlimited budgets. He booked “circular tickets”: Argentina, Chile, Australia… “In fourteen days, I went around the world. In color.”
« Extreme Hotel », by Raymond Depardon, is on view until April 12, 2026 at Pavillon Populaire, in Montpellier, France.
