Photojournalist and former war reporter Marie-Laure de Decker died on Saturday July 15 at the age of 75, according to information provided by the family to Agence France-Presse and Le Monde. She died following a long illness in a hospital in Toulouse, near the house in Tarn where she had lived for several years.
Native of Bône (today Annaba in Algeria), she had started as a model, before moving on to the other side of the lens by immortalizing artists like Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and Philippe Soupault in the late 1960s.
Passionate about travel and Africa, she went to photograph the Vietnam War with minimal experience and succeeded in her bet.
“I was like, people are going to see that I’m not a real photographer, that I don’t have a camera of my own, that I only have this old Leica. In fact, I knew it afterwards, this old Leica was a marvel,” she recounted in a memoir in 1985.
“If you’re a woman, you’re never taken seriously”
Being a female war reporter hasn’t been easy – “If you’re a woman, you’re never taken seriously” – but, she said, “there’s an advantage to being a woman, like this was the case in South Africa, we don’t kill you right away, we give you a chance”. The Chairperson of the African Union Commission, Chadian Moussa Faki, paid tribute to her on Twitter, noting that, “through her images”, she had “immortalized part of the history of Chad”.
Marie-Laure de Decker will have a career at Gamma from 1971 until 1979. By asking to recover her photos after the closure of the agency in 2009, she will only obtain the black and white, not the color, and will lose a lawsuit to have its copyright recognized on the digitized images.
She is also known for having photographed personalities like Serge Gainsbourg and Caroline of Monaco. She had two sons.
