Marc Riboud - North Vietnam - 1970

"The first book to be published in the United States to show the country as it is."

SUPER BEAUTIFUL, RARE, EARLY PUBLICATION by famous French Magnum photographer Marc Riboud (1923-2016) from 1970 (!), perfectly designed by Régis Pagniez and Guy Trillat, Paris.

HIGHLY IMPRESSIVE IMAGES OF NORTH VIETNAM DURING THE VIETNAM WAR.
Full-page black and white photographs of the bombings, the countryside, Hanoi, and factory and school life. Marc Riboud's photos have appeared in Life, Look, and Newsweek.

Marc Riboud was best known for his extensive reports on the Far East:
The Three Banners of China, Face of North Vietnam, Visions of China, and In China.

Illustrated throughout with Riboud's candid black and white photography, detailing all aspects of life in the North from life in the factories and schools, to military training, and anti-aircraft emplacements manned by 70 year old men. The text by Phillipe Devillers attempts to give a timeline and historical structure to help make sense of the contemporary situation.

Riboud travelled extensively in Vietnam as part of his work as a photojournalist for Magnum.

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'Born in Lyons in 1923, Marc Riboud was active in the French Resistance from 1942 to 1945. Until 1951, Riboud worked as an engineer in Lyons factories, then became a freelance photographer and moved to Paris in 1952. He was invited to join Magnum as an associate by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa in 1953; in 1955 he became a full member.
In the mid-1950s, he set off for India in a specially converted Land Rover that once belonged to Magnum co-founder George Rodger, who had used it for his celebrated work in Africa. When he went to China in 1957, Riboud was one of the first European photographers to visit the country; he returned for a lengthy stay in 1965 with writer K. S. Karol. He is best known for his extensive reports on the East: The Three Banners of China (1966), Faces of North Vietnam (1970), Visions of China (1981), Angkor: The Serenity of Buddhism (1992), In China (1996), Tomorrow Shanghai (2003) and Istanbul 1954–1998 (2003).
One of his most famous pictures was taken in Washington, DC, during the 1967 March for Peace in Vietnam: a young woman holds a flower towards the bayonets of soldiers guarding the Pentagon. Riboud’s photographs have appeared in numerous magazines, including Life, Geo, National Geographic, Paris-Match and Stern. He twice won the Overseas Press Club Award (1966 and 1970), and had major retrospectives at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1985), International Center of Photography, New York (1988 and 1997), and Maison Européenne de la Photographie (2004). In 2011, he donated 192 original prints made between 1953 and 1977 to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. His work has been distinguished by numerous prestigious awards and is held in museums and galleries including the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum in Beijing, and Moderna Museet in Stockholm, among others.
Marc Riboud died in Paris on August 30, 2016, aged 93. The core of his archives has been donated to Guimet National Museum of Asian Arts, Paris.'
(Magnum's website)

Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco. 1970. First edition, first printing.

Paperback. 215 x 280 mm. 200 pages. Photos: Marc Riboud. Text: Philippe Devillers. Text in English.

Condition:
Inside fresh and flawless; clean with no marks and with no foxing. Outside front with little trace of use, rear side with stronger trace of use and with some surface defects (see pictures), spine with the usual sunning and creasing (happens quickly, starting from first opening). Overall very good condition.

Fantastic, early, highly impressive Marc Riboud title from 1970 - rare.

"Marc Riboud was born in Saint-Genis-Laval and went to the lycée in Lyon. He photographed his first picture in 1937, using his father's Vest Pocket Kodak camera. As a young man during World War II, he was active in the French Resistance, from 1943 to 1945. After the war, he studied engineering at the École Centrale de Lyon from 1945 to 1948.
Until 1951 Riboud worked as an engineer in Lyon factories, but took a week-long picture-taking vacation, inspiring him to become a photographer. He moved to Paris where he met Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and David Seymour, the founders of Magnum Photos. By 1953 he was a member of the organization. His ability to capture fleeting moments in life through powerful compositions was already apparent, and this skill was to serve him well for decades to come.
Over the next several decades, Riboud traveled around the world. In 1957, he was one of the first European photographers to go to China, and in 1968, 1972, and 1976, Riboud made several reportages on North Vietnam. Later he traveled all over the world, but mostly in Asia, Africa, the U.S. and Japan. Riboud has been witness to the atrocities of war (photographing from both the Vietnam and the American sides of the Vietnam War), and the apparent degradation of a culture repressed from within (China during the years of chairman Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution). In contrast, he has captured the graces of daily life, set in sun-drenched facets of the globe (Fès, Angkor, Acapulco, Niger, Bénarès, Shaanxi), and the lyricism of child's play in everyday Paris. In 1979 Riboud left the Magnum agency.
Riboud's photographs have appeared in numerous magazines, including Life, Géo, National Geographic, Paris Match, and Stern. He twice won the Overseas Press Club Award, received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2009 Sony World Photography Awards and has had major retrospective exhibitions at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the International Center of Photography in New York.
Riboud was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in 1998.
One of Riboud's best known images is Eiffel Tower Painter, taken in Paris in 1953. It depicts a man painting the tower, posed like a dancer, perched between the metal armature of the tower. Below him, Paris emerges from the photographic haze. Lone figures appear frequently in Riboud's images. In Ankara, a central figure is silhouetted against an industrial background, whereas in France, a man lies in a field. The vertical composition emphasizes the landscape, the trees, sky, water and blowing grass, all of which surround but do not overpower the human element.
An image taken by Riboud on 21 October 1967, entitled "The Ultimate Confrontation: The Flower and the Bayonet," is among the most celebrated anti-war pictures. Shot in Washington, D.C. where thousands of anti-war activists had gathered in front of the Pentagon to protest against America's involvement in Vietnam, the picture shows a young girl, Jan Rose Kasmir, with a flower in her hands and a kindly gaze in her eyes, standing in front of several rifle-wielding soldiers stationed to block the protesters. Riboud said of the photo, "She was just talking, trying to catch the eye of the soldiers, maybe trying to have a dialogue with them. I had the feeling the soldiers were more afraid of her than she was of the bayonets."
In contrast to the images in his photo essay, A Journey to North Vietnam (1969), Riboud says in the accompanying interview: "My impression is that the country's leaders will not allow the slightest relaxation of the population at large [...] it is almost as if [...] they are anxious to forestall the great unknown – peace." In the same Newsweek article, he expanded further in his observations on life in North Vietnam:
I was astonished, for example, at the decidedly gay atmosphere in Hanoi's Reunification Park on a Sunday afternoon [...] I honestly did not have the impression they were discussing socialism or the 'American aggressors' [...] I saw quite a few patriotic posters crudely 'improved' with erotic graffiti and sketches.
There is a divide between what is photographed (or published) and what Riboud had to say by way of his interview. Commenting on this in 1970, the author Geoffrey Wolff wrote:
Riboud's photographs illustrate the proposition. The French photographer has been to North Vietnam twice [...] and he is most friendly, on the evidence of his pictures, to the people and the institutions he found there. His photographs are of happy faces,[...] An Air Force ace illustrates how he shot the American "air pirates" from the sky [...] Who knows the truth about these places?
American, revolutionary political Rap Metal band, Rage Against the Machine used two of Riboud's photographs for their second single "Bullet in the Head". Both photographs carry strong political and social messages, but are very different. The front cover is a picture of American school children pledging allegiance to the 'flag' (Stars and Stripes) in a classroom; the back cover picture, is of a young (probably Vietnamese) boy, who is pointing a pistol, while soldiers stand on parade in the background. It is unclear who or what the boy is aiming at and whether the gun is real or a toy."
(Wikipedia)