Raymond Depardon: Rural

Text by Raymond Depardon
86 black-and-white photographs

Born in 1942 in Villefranche-sur-Saône Raymond Depardon a filmmaker, photographer and international journalist holds a unique place in the field of the contemporary image. In 1967, he co-founded the Gamma Agency, and in 1978, he joined the Magnum Agency for whom he would carry out reports all over the world up until the beginning of the 1980s. While continuing to practise photography on a daily basis, he later turned his attention to documentary film, making use of the direct cinema genre.

From his first pictures taken in the early 1960s to his latest trips to Africa and South America, Depardon's work is characterized by its fundamentally human approach. In 2010, he presented the exhibition La France de Raymond Depardon, at the BnF François-Mitterrand in Paris, in 2013, Un moment si doux, at the Grand Palais in Paris, and in 2019, Raymond Depardon: 1962-1963, photographe militaire at the Musée national de la Marine in Toulon and at the Musée du Service de santé des armées - École du Val-de-Grâce in Paris. With his wife Claudine Nougaret, Raymond Depardon has produced numerous films: Urgences (1988), La Captive du désert (1990), Délits flagrants (1994), Paris (1998), 10e chambre, instants d'audiences (2004), La Vie moderne (2008), Journal de France (2012), Les Habitants (2016), and 12 jours (2017).

Raymond Depardon has participated in around ten solo or group exhibitions at the Fondation Cartier, for which he realized the films Amours (1997), Désert (2000), Chasseurs et chamans (2002), 7×3 (2004), Hear Them Speak (2008), Au bonheur des Maths (2011), 8e étage (2014), and Mon arbre (2019). He has also published over fifty photography books.