Gilles Caron, the Tipping Point
A short life, a dazzling career served by burning news, images that, today, record history: everything is in place to make photojournalist Gilles Caron a legendary figure. Born in 1939, he joined the Gamma agency in March 1967, and left to cover the Six-Day War in Israel before spending two months in Vietnam. The following year he travelled three times to Biafra, where civil war and famine reigned. In the meantime, he followed the events of May in Paris. In September the repression of student demonstrations called him to Mexico City. In 1969 he was in Derry and Belfast, which were torn apart by the Troubles, conflict between the British army and the Catholics; before going to Czechoslovakia where, on the anniversary of the crushing of the Prague Spring, the revolt grumbled. At the beginning of 1970 he went to Chad to cover a secessionist rebellion. After being attacked by the Tubu rebels, he was taken prisoner by the regular army. He then left for Cambodia, where he disappeared on April 4 in circumstances that have never been clarified.
Over the past ten years, spurred on or supported by the Gilles Caron Foundation, created in 2007, there has been a proliferation of initiatives that seek less to perpetuate the legend than to understand Caron and his work. In Le Conflit Intérieur [The Conflict Within], a major history book that accompanied an exhibition at the Musée de l’Élysée in Lausanne in 2013, (1) Michel Poivert placed Caron in the existential camp, and concentrated on his experience, lived in the mode of rejection, of the Algerian war in order to analyse his reports, but also his reflection in action on his profession. (2)
In 2019, in her beautiful film Looking for Gilles Caron, Mariana Otero followed in the photographer’s footsteps to investigate his fieldwork, his images and his fate. (3) Finally, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Caron’s death, a young generation of researchers, Guillaume Blanc, Clara Bouveresse and Isabella Seniuta, broadened the field by placing the photojournalist in the economy of reportage. Their very detailed exhibition Gilles Caron, Un Monde Imparfait [Gilles Caron, an imperfect world] is currently on show in Cherbourg, at the Point du Jour, which is publishing a catalogue reviewing Caron’s main body of work. (4) Without restricting themselves to published images alone—Caron took more than 100,000 photographs—these initiatives are based on research in the archives, on the published part of correspondence—the letters to his mother, pending those to his wife—and on contact sheets.The latter, which bring together all the views on a film, help to understand the photographer’s intentions and method. This research makes Caron a transitional figure, heir to the golden age of photojournalism of the 1930s, and heralding the questioning of the 1970s, which led to new, more self-aware, distanced practices.
CHOREOGRAPHIES
Photojournalists like Robert Capa, equipped in the 1930s with lightweight cameras—the famous Leica—had made heroism a founding value of the profession: “If your photographs aren’t good enough, it’s because you’re not close enough”. Caron says no differently: “You always have to stick to the subject to get something worthwhile.” Sporting and independent, with a great sense of terrain and a bit of luck, he was everywhere and on the front line.
He was in the thick of the fighting during the American offensive at Dak To: “I got to the top, I was all splattered with blood, flesh, stuff.” He wasn’t only fast, he also had stamina. You have to be tough to go from Northern Ireland to Czechoslovakia and publish—exceptionally—two major reports in the same issue of Paris Match. In addition to these physical qualities, there was his technical mastery—almost all of a film was usable—and the precision of his eye. The geometry of some of his compositions is in no way inferior to that of Cartier-Bresson. Nonetheless, Caron wasn’t content to merely continue a tradition. Poivert clearly shows how, faced with the evolution of conflicts that have become urban revolts or guerrilla wars involving the population, he renewed their iconography. In Paris and Derry, he introduced the figure of the pavement or Molotov cocktail thrower, whose choreographed gestures he captured. In general, unlike excellent colleagues of his generation such as the British photographer Don McCullin, Caron focuses on civilian victims. The best example is Biafra, where the population was suffering from a famine or
ganised by the contested government. Far from shock photography, he favoured a compassionate approach.These images were published shortly after his return in La Mort au Biafra ! [The Death in Biafra!], a book published on the initiative of the Gamma agency.
SCHOOL OF THE EYE
The role of the agency to which Caron belonged shouldn’t be overlooked. Created at the very beginning of 1967 on the model of the Magnum cooperative by Raymond Depardon, Hubert Henrotte, Jean Monteux and Hugues Vassal, Gamma very quickly established itself as one of the main agencies. It intervened at all stages of the photojournalist’s work. It supported and guided them in the field. Isabella Seniuta shows how, from Paris, Hubert Henrotte guided Caron to Vietnam and suggested subjects that the photographer didn’t feel obliged to cover: although he did take pictures of the prostitution that was developing around the presence of American troops, he didn’t photograph the actress Raquel Welch, who had come to support them. Beyond the events for which the photojournalists were sent, the agency’s suggestions aimed to get the photographers to address other subjects, which could be added to Gamma’s photo library and marketed later. Because the agency’s main function is to edit the reports and caption the images in order to sell them, the market is very competitive, so you have to be able to stand out while meeting certain standards that determine practices and images. Clara Bouveresse speaks of a “school of the eye”. For example, in order to be able to sell photographs on a single or double page, Caron also uses colour, sometimes going so far as to double his reports. Moreover, while the press publishes stories, series of photographs that sometimes constitute a narrative edited by the agency, they are also keen on images that summarise the event. Caron is the author of several of these icons, the historical analysis of which confirms that many of the great snapshots in the history of photojournalism are, in their own way, composed images. This is the case for the famous portrait of Daniel Cohn-Bendit taunting a policeman. Guillaume Blanc describes it as an “‘icon’ in spite of everything”—at the time, it went unnoticed and only owes its fate to later commemorations—and Mariana Otero, by analysing the contact sheets, shows how it is the fruit of a construction, almost a staging of a Cohn-Bendit who was well aware of Caron’s presence.
And yet, in this economy of photojournalism, where the image has a use and commercial value, Caron multiplied the views that have little chance of being published. These are melancholic moments of latency—when he photographed soldiers absorbed in their reading—or even of pure contemplation—the crossing of the Libyan and Chadian deserts provides many such moments. Should we see this as a reaction to what Poivert has called “the photographer’s unhappy conscience”? As evidenced by a photograph taken in Biafra showing Depardon filming a child victim of famine testifies, Caron knew the moral limits of his status and of his action. No doubt he echoes a profession. But unlike Depardon, who tends towards egotism, or McCullin, who turns to landscapes and immemorial ruins, Caron only had time to sketch out new paths.
1 Gilles Caron: Le Conflit intérieur, Photosynthèses, 2013 (416 p., 69 euros). 2 Also noteworthy, as an extension of Le Conflit Intérieur, Gilles Caron 1968, exhibition at the Hôtel de Ville de Paris in 2018 and book published by Flammarion (286 pp., 39.90 euros). See, on this subject, the article by Aurélie Cavanna, “Gilles Caron, photographe des années 1968”, on artpress.com. 3 The film is available on VOD on Univers Ciné and Orange. 4 Gilles Caron: Un Monde Imparfait, Le Point du Jour, 2020 (112 pp., 28 euros).