Known for her work as a photojournalist, particularly in Vietnam or South Africa, Marie-Laure de Decker had also photographed personalities such as Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Philippe Soupault, then Serge Gainbourg, Caroline of Monaco or President Valéry Giscard d ‘Estaing.
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Photojournalist Marie-Laure de Decker, who had been a war reporter, died on Saturday at the age of 75, her family learned on Saturday July 15. She died after a long illness in a hospital in Toulouse.
Native of Bône (today Annaba, in Algeria), she started as a model, before wanting to go to the other side of the lens, immortalizing at the end of the 1960s artists like Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and Philippe Soupault.
Passionate about travel and Africa, she left to photograph the Vietnam War with minimal experience. But she succeeds in her bet. “I said to myself: people will 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.
“An advantage of being a woman”
Being a female war reporter hasn’t been easy. “If you are a woman, you are never taken seriously”, she said. On the other hand, “there is an advantage to being a woman, as was the case in South Africa: we don’t kill you right away, we give you a chance.”
Marie-Laure de Decker will have a career at the Gamma agency, from 1971 until its liquidation in 2009. The story will end badly: asking to recover her photos, she will only get the black and white shots, not those in color, and will lose a lawsuit to have his copyright recognized on the digitized photos.
She is also known for having photographed personalities such as Serge Gainsbourg, Caroline of Monaco or President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, learning on television of her 1974 presidential victory. She had two sons.