Marc Riboud, Photofile, book review

Inside the small-format, paperback edition are more than 60 photographs from Riboud plus an essay, by the man himself

A new addition to the concise and accessible “Photofile” series from Thames & Hudson features the French photographer Marc Riboud.

Contained within the small-format, paperback edition are more than 60 photographs from Riboud plus an essay, by the man himself, detailing his career and the key moments in history that he was witness to through his lens.

Riboud is best known for his extensive reports on the East. A member of the Magnum agency for more than 30 years and a friend and colleague of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa in Paris during the 1950s, Riboud was one of the first photographers to visit China.

In the following decades he travelled extensively, notably on commissions for Life and National Geographic magazines.

The cover of this selection features one of the photographer’s most celebrated and imitated images – a young girl at an anti –war demo offering a flower to a soldier who’s brandishing a rifle.

That now famous image, taken at a protest against the Vietnam War in Washington DC in 1967, came for many to encapsulate the Summer of Love.

Riboud has said: “I had the feeling the soldiers were more afraid of her than she was of the bayonets.”

Marc Riboud, Photofile. Thames & Hudson £9.95