Riboud was born in 1923 in Lyon. At the Great Exhibition of Paris in 1937, he took his first pictures with the small Vest-Pocket camera his father gave him. During the war, he took part in the Vercors fights, and from 1945 to 1948, he studied engineering and worked in a factory. After a week on holiday, during which he covered the cultural festival of Lyon, he dropped his engineering job for photography. In 1953, he published his famous Eiffel Tower’s painter photograph in LIFE magazine and joined the Magnum Agency after meeting Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa.
After three months in the USSR in 1960, he followed the independence movement in Algeria and Western Africa. Between 1968 and 1969, he was one of the few photographers allowed to travel in South and North Vietnam. In 1976, he become president of Magnum and resigned three years later to travel more. In 2004, his retrospective is exhibited at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, visited by over 100,000 people. Numerous museums throughout Europe, as well as United States, China, and Japan, regularly show his work. He has received many awards, including two Overseas Press Club, the Time-Life Achievement, the Lucie Award, and the ICP Infinity Award.
The core of Riboud's archives were donated to the National Museum of Asian Arts - Guimet, Paris. He also contributed 192 prints made between 1953-1977 to the Centre Georges Pompidou in 2011. Marc Riboud passed away in Paris on August 30th, 2016.
(via marcriboud.com)