Marc Riboud is probably best known for his picture The Ultimate Confrontation: The Flower and the Bayonet. It shows Jan Rose Kasmir, a 17-year-old and one of the nearly 100,000 anti-war protestors that had gathered at the Pentagon in Washington DC on 21 October, 1967, at a rally opposing the Vietnam War. She holds a single chrysanthemum in both her hands as a sort of peace offering as she faces a line of bayonet-wielding National Guardsmen.
It was Riboud’s last shot of the day. He would later remember: ‘Hundreds of thousands of young men and women, both black and white, were defiantly closing in on the Pentagon, the citadel of the most powerful army in the world and for a day America’s youth presented America with a handsome face. I was taking photographs like mad, running out of film as night fell. The very last photo was the best. Framed in my viewfinder was the symbol of that America youth: a flower held before a row of bayonets. America’s might that day, presented America with a sad face.’ He also separately said of Kasmir, ‘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.’
Riboud would experience the war in Vietnam and document it in pictures from both sides between 1968 and 1969. He was no stranger to conflict himself, having fought for the French Resistance in WWII.
Although he’d taken his first pictures in 1937 at Paris’s Exposition Universelle – with the Vest Pocket Kodak that was a 14th-birthday present from his father – it was only after the war that he decided to dedicate himself to photography. After three years working as an engineer, he took up his new career and proceeded to travel extensively, capturing images over the years in Algeria, the Middle East, the USSR, Afghanistan, sub-Saharan Africa, India and China, among other places.
However, his first published image was taken closer to home and is surely one of the great “city” images of all time. The Eiffel Tower Painter, Paris (1953) shows a balletic workman poised on the ironwork of Gustave Eiffel’s iconic structure. Paris lies below, and though we cannot see the tower’s famous form, we know exactly where we are and what we are looking at. Riboud said: ‘While painting the Eiffel Tower, this fellow – nicknamed Zazou – was perfectly relaxed. But I felt dizzy and had to close my eyes every time he leaned over to dip his brush in the paint can.’
The picture was printed in Life magazine in 1953, and Riboud then joined the famous Magnum Photos cooperative, invited to become a member by founders Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson. The Ultimate Confrontation: The Flower and the Bayonet, would be taken on assignment for Magnum.
Riboud’s work has appeared in numerous magazines other than Life, including Paris Match, National Geographic and Stern, and is the subject of a number of books, many of which feature his pictures taken in the Far East. His photography has also been exhibited at New York’s International Center of Photography and the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, which both staged major retrospectives. He was the two-times winner of the Overseas Press Club Award and, at the 2009 Sony World Photography Awards, took home the Lifetime Achievement Award.
The Eiffel Tower Painter, Paris, 1953, by Marc Riboud is available as a gelatin silver print mounted to aluminium, edition of three, from the Atlas Photography Gallery; atlasgallery.com
