Marc Riboud’s story in Vietnam seems to begin with his iconic photograph, Girl with a Flower, taken on October 21, 1967, in Washington during a demonstration against the Vietnam War. Against the involvement of the American army in this chain of violence in the east of the Indochinese peninsula.
In 1966, the photographer had already had the opportunity to go there, to the South. “Like many left-wingers at the time, this war interested him,” explains Catherine Chaine-Riboud, whom he met in 1978 and married a few years later. He therefore went to an American aircraft carrier from which the bombers took off. Indoctrinated, convinced that they were only hitting military targets, the American soldiers were sure of the merits of their mission. Not letting themselves be “led up the garden path,” as Catherine Chaine-Riboud explains with a laugh, he decided to cover this demonstration in October 1967.
At the same time, Ho Chi Minh, then president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the North, aware of the weight of American opinion on this war, decided to give him access to the north of the country. “Marc was one of the only ones to gain access to this part of the country. Ho Chi Minh was looking for peace agreements,” explains Catherine Chaine-Riboud. The Vietnamese president saw this as an opportunity: to influence the opinion of the American people.
Life despite war
Arriving in North Vietnam, he documented the daily life of these people who, despite the war, the bombings, and the omnipresent death, continued to live, often with a smile. Smiles that can be found in Riboud’s images, almost as often as the wheels of bicycles, then a popular means of transport for the locals. Smiles retained by these women, covered in mud up to their hips, tasked with rebuilding a dam that previous bombings had destroyed and whom he photographed on the spot, without making them pose.
In November 1968, he met Ho Chi Minh and his minister Pham Van Dong. The photograph went around the world and appeared on the cover of numerous magazines. When he received it, the former spoke of the “hundreds of thousands of men, women and children who had suffered in their flesh”. On September 2, 1969, less than a year later, the Vietnamese president died in Hanoi; Marc Riboud returned there to document the reactions of the population.
Not only did he photograph “the resistance, the resilience” of the Vietnamese people, but it was also “the first time that Americans saw the faces of their enemies,” says Catherine Chaine-Riboud. Faces that Marc Riboud brought together in his book Face of North Vietnam, published in the United States in 1970.
Between family and reports
In 1966, when he first left for Vietnam, Marc Riboud married Barbara Chase, whom he divorced in 1980. He had two children from this first union. They were quite young in 1966 and had to deal with a father who had gone to document a war on the other side of the world. “He wasn’t going to the front, but to the rear. He was interested in people, not soldiers,” explains Catherine Chaine-Riboud. “He wasn’t a war reporter.”
While the anxiety is thus less great, it remains within the realm of the imaginable. Because war, near or far, remains a significant element in Marc Riboud’s life: that of Vietnam, from 1966 to 1976, which he covered and photographed, but also the Second World War, which he suffered head-on – he was then only 16 years old. A war that he experienced twice: when he lived through it, from Lyon, and when it took his father from him who, traumatized by the first, committed suicide in November 1939.
“In the photographs of Vietnam, it is not the fighting that we see, but the daily life in the ruins, the bodies trying to rest in makeshift shelters, the lovers who meet near bomb shelters, the liveliness of the children, the unchanged grace of the women. We also discover the despair of the widows in the temples or churches, the courage of those who rebuild with their bare hands, the dikes or entire neighborhoods in pieces…” Photographs which, 50 years later, take on even more meaning compared to the clichés of current wars.
“Marc Riboud. Photographs of Vietnam. 1966-1976” , on view until May 12, 2025 at the Guimet Museum , in Paris.
