Witness of our time and restless spirit of Paris '68 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/20bc153a-812d-11dd-82dd-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1
By Phil Davison Published: September 13 2008 Françoise Demulder was one of the foremost war photographers of the late 20th century and the first woman to win the most sought-after prize in her profession, the World Press Photo award, with her 1976 image of a distraught Palestinian woman pleading with a hooded militiaman amid the flames of Beirut. "Fifi" Demulder was a postwar boom baby, a "child of the Sixties" inspired by the spirit of Paris '68, who popped up on the frontlines of war in her unique combination of black leather trousers, brightblouse and combat boots. Her career as a war correspondent ended after a medical error during treatment for leukaemia left her paraplegic in her mid-50s. Such was Demulder's status in France that it was Christine Albanel, minister of culture, who formally confirmed her death of a heart attack this month at the age of 61, calling her "a remark-able woman, an artist and witness of our time". On assignment for one of the big international news photo agencies, usually Gamma or Sipa, Demulder produced pictures from zones of conflict or disaster that appeared regularly from the late 1960s in what world news photographers consider their most important and lucrative outlets - Time, Newsweek, Stern and Paris Match magazines and a handful of main newspapers. Hers was the only still photograph of the first North Vietnamese army tank battering through the gates of the Independence Palace - seat of the US-backed South Vietnamese government - in Saigon on April 30 1975, shortly after the last US Marines had helicoptered off the roof of the US embassy. It was an image that symbolised South Vietnamese and US defeat and signalled the end of a 16-year war that had cost so many Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, American and other lives. (Twenty years on, Demulder went back to trace the four crewmen of Viet Cong tank 390. By then they were a barber, a road painter, a bus safety inspector and a forklift driver, all of whom she brought together for an emotional first reunion.) Typically, she had stayed in the city after most reporters and photographers had left. She ventured into the streets when some of her male colleagues, who talked a good war in hotel bars, opted to remain in the relative safety of those hotels. Another of her most famous pictures, less violent but no less telling, was of an exhausted Viet Cong fighter on the steps of the Saigon Opera House, gorging on his first meal in days - a bowl of rice. She was one of the few journalists who risked staying on in Baghdad in January 1991 when the US, in response to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, had announced its intention to launch an all-out air war on the city, a promise President George Bush Sr carried out with a vengeance. Demulder's images of the air war - in advance of an allied land push into Kuwait - and "collateral damage" on the ground appeared in Time and other publications worldwide. Demulder was born in Paris on June 9 1947. She began studying philosophy but, tall, lanky and bearing a striking resemblance to one of France's top stars of the time - the singer, Françoise Hardy - she found she could pay her bills by modelling. Jolted by the 1968 student uprising in her native city, and inspired by gritty pictures from Vietnam by such photographers as Britons Larry Burrows and Don McCullin and fellow Parisienne Cathy Leroy, she bought a one-way ticket to Saigon in 1969. Like Leroy a couple of years earlier, she came under the wing of the legendary "shooter", Horst Faas, Saigon bureau chief of the Associated Press news agency. She would head for the combat action on a motorbike or hitch on a US Huey helicopter, returning to Saigon covered in dust to present her pictures to Mr Faas, who put them out on the AP wire to the world. Demulder's and Leroy's photographs, coupled with the growth of French news photo agencies and the influence on photo-graphy of the magazine Paris Match, helped make Paris the capital of photojournalism in the 1970s and 1980s. From Saigon, Demulder went to Laos and Cambodia whenever the combat was hotter there before covering the conflict in Angola in the mid-1970s, then on to Beirut for the civil war of 1975-76 and that prizewinning black-and-white picture, which she titled "Distress in Lebanon". She had rushed to the Palestinian refugee camp known as Karantina on January 18 1976 after reports that Lebanese Christian militiamen had overrun the camp, massacring up to 1,000 Palestinians. Her agency, Gamma, never ran the picture she had shipped among several rolls of film to Paris. It was after she returned home that she printed it and had it published, winning the World Press Photo award in 1977. The effect of that single image on world opinion initiated a long friendship between Demulder and Yassir Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, who delighted in calling her "Fifi". She photographed him in various hiding places in and around Beirut, and later in exile in Libya and Tunisia. Largely based in Beirut, Demulder was one of the first on the scene of the bombing of the seafront US embassy on April 18 1983, in which more than 60 people died, and an even bloodier suicide attack on the barracks of the US Marines and their French allies in the city on October 23 of the same year. Through much of the same decade, the leather trousers popped up on the frontlines of the war of egos between Saddam and Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini in which 1m people died. In December 1987 she was in Karachi to photograph the arranged marriage of Benazir Bhutto to Asif Ali Zardari, now Pakistan's president - images, again, that travelled around the world. "Fifi was a nomad. Journalism for her was not a way of earning money," says Noël Quidu, a French photographer for Gamma. "It was a reason for living and breathing." . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to sixties-l@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
