Photojournalist Marie-Laure de Decker, who had been a war reporter, died on Saturday July 15 at the age of 75, we learned from the family. She died after a long illness in a hospital in Toulouse. Native of Bône (now 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 60s 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 my own camera, that I only have this old Leica. In fact, I knew it afterwards, this old Leica was a marvel”, she told in a book of memories in 1985.
Being a woman war reporter was not easy – “if you are a woman you are never taken seriously” – but on the other hand, she said, “there is an advantage to being a woman, as this was the case in South Africa, we don’t kill you right away, we give you a chance”.
She 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, not the colors, and will lose a lawsuit to have its copyright recognized on the digitized images. 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 his 1974 presidential victory. She had two sons, including one with lawyer Thierry Lévy.
