Marc Riboud’s Vietnam by Jean Loh
These are very touching note and text from our collaborator Jean Loh on Marc Riboud, whose exhibition is about to end at the Musée Guimet.
Hello Jean-Jacques,
I’ve been working on this essay about Marc Riboud’s photos, which can still be seen at the Guimet Museum, for three weeks. This 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, widely discussed and recalled by documentaries on all channels, is very moving for me, because I was born in Saigon, and my parents had to leave just the day before the fall of Saigon in the Taiwanese ambassador’s last helicopter, carrying only hand luggage. Members of my family were less fortunate and found themselves fleeing like boat people. A cousin and his father disappeared in Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge emptied the capital, Phnom Penh, shortly before the fall of Saigon.
The Vietnam War as seen and experienced by Marc Riboud 1966-1976
Marc Riboud left his family cocoon in 1955 for a long journey “Towards the Orient”, driving a Land Rover, he crossed Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan to arrive in India in 1956. In 1957 he stayed four months in China and in 1958 he went to photograph Japan. This initiatory journey proves that there is something fascinating for him in this notion of “the Orient”. In 1953, the year he created his masterpiece “The Painter of the Eiffel Tower” in Paris, he met Robert Capa who would later take him to London, from there he went on to photograph Leeds, Manchester, Blackpool, Liverpool. But Capa’s decisive influence on Marc Riboud was Vietnam. When Capa returned to London to check n Marc in 1954, Marc went to see him at his hotel. Capa, in the bathtub, smoking a cigar, asked him: “So you speak English now? Have you met the English girls?” Marc replied with embarrassment: “Neither, but I took a lot of photos.” Before leaving, Capa received a phone call asking him to go to Japan. And that was the last time Marc Riboud saw Capa, because when he went to hand his photos of Leeds to the editor of Picture Post, the latter told him “Capa is dead” in Vietnam, having stepped on a mine while patrolling with the French soldiers on the road to Nam Dinh. Since then, Marc has been inconsolable and every time he could go to New York, he would go to pay his respects at Robert Capa’s grave, and Vietnam would forever remain associated with Capa’s memory. (*1)
Actually, Marc Riboud first became aware of the Vietnam War it was in 1965, during his second trip to China. In Beijing, Marc noticed unusual preparations in Tiananmen Square, and he ended up photographing the huge demonstration organized by the students of the Academy of Fine Arts, who marched holding banners and placards, shouting slogans in support of Vietnam against the Americans. Some students were dressed up or made up as American pilots shot down and taken prisoner by the Viet Minh, others wore tailcoats and top hats to mock Uncle Sam. And suddenly, in his viewfinder, two faces appeared side by side: a portrait of Mao and that of Ho Chi Minh, and the raised fist of a protester shouting with his mouth wide open completed this powerful iconic image (*2). However, unbeknownst to Marc, this demonstration was far from spontaneous; it was in fact instructed by Chairman Mao who, at the same time, in the capital of his native province, Changsha, was secretly receiving Ho Chi Minh who had come to ask China for help. Two battalions of Marines had just landed in Da Nang, South Vietnam, in March 1965! In response, Mao would send engineers to help build and repair the 12 supply routes from the North to the South, and 80,000 “volunteers to help the Vietnam war effort” who would be dressed in the uniform of the North Vietnamese army. Chairman Mao, finding Ho Chi Minh looking out of shape, recommended that he go and rest on Yellow Mountain, the very Yellow Mountain that Marc Riboud would photograph eight times in the 1980s, still bears some Ho Chi Minh’s calligraphy engraved on the rock (*3).
Of these routes restored by the Chinese engineers, we can see in the exhibition at the Guimet Museum this portrait by Marc Riboud of a North Vietnamese peasant-soldier pushing his reinforced bicycle, which could carry more than 200 kg of supplies, going down south in the famous bicycle convoy. Another photo of two North Vietnamese stretcher-bearers transporting a wounded man on two bicycles shows Ho Chi Minh’s sense of urgency. As from February 1965 to November 1968, the Americans also launched the bombing campaign against North Vietnam dubbed Rolling Thunder. This is what motivated Marc Riboud, who arrived in Saigon in December 1966, to request and obtain permission from MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) to “be embedded” on board the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Enterprise of the US 7th Fleet. He then took rare photographs of F4 Phantom II fighter jets, Skyhawks, and Intruders taking off by catapult day and night to drop their bombs on North Vietnam (*4).
Marc Riboud was awed and feeling revolted on the aircraft carrier, we can read his article about the blind barbarity of the American bombing, published in April 1967 in the newspaper Le Monde. Here is an excerpt from his report:
“I attended the mission report by the pilot of an Intruder aircraft, Commander Arthur Barie, who reported how he had just bombed the Nam Dinh train station at night, in zero visibility. Surprise attack, very low, under heavy enemy flak… “We are sure we have hit the center of the objective, sir!” the pilot said proudly. “No mistake: our radar allows us to be certain.” The Intruder is indeed equipped with extraordinary radar. And thereupon, Captain Holloway, because of my presence, asked: “Were there any victims?” Immediate response: “No, sir! No victims!” However, misfortune would have it – I learned and verified this exactly later – that on that same night a French filmmaker, Roger Pic, was present at Nam-Dinh. He has seen the raid. Half an hour later, he has photographed the damage. It was indeed, without any possible dispute, according to the time which coincided exactly, Commander Arthur Barie’s raid. Well, the station hadn’t been hit, but the bombs had hit a dike, and there were several dead, civilians…” On returning from a mission on a Phantom, another pilot told me: “This morning the weather was very bad inland, so we flew over the coast several times. I saw junks, small boats, by the hundreds. We fired on those small boats, we destroyed many of them.” In the press release the next day it was reported “Two hundred and thirty-three boats destroyed on the coast of North Vietnam.” This pilot a moment later told me, with his strong Midwestern accent and good-natured tone: “You see, sometimes I wonder; these men on these junks are certainly poor fishermen, illiterate and superstitious in life; well, when they see us coming at over 2,000 an hour right above their heads, I really wonder what they must think of us!”
The most respected Vietnam War photographer, Philip Jones Griffiths (also a member of Magnum) happened to be on another aircraft carrier cruising the South China Sea, in his book “Vietnam Inc.”, he captioned his photos of the pilots and sailors on the carrier’s deck: “The sailors and pilots on board have never been to Vietnam. They have never seen the faces of their victims, the Vietnamese people.”
It was with this sense of injustice and empathy (5*) that in October 1967 Marc Riboud decided to join the 100,000 young anti-war protesters marching on the Pentagon in Washington. To thwart them, the administration of President Lyndon B Johnson mobilized the National Guard and the Military Police to come defend the Pentagon. On that day of October 21, 1967, Marc Riboud, like the rest of journalists and photographers, followed this march until the end of the afternoon, when the daylight was fading. In this face-off between the demonstrators and the soldiers, a 17-year-old girl, Jane Rose Kasmir, approached the soldiers, holding a chrysanthemum flower in her hands. Marc Riboud took several pictures and realized that he had reached the end of his film; this would be the last shot on his roll of black and white negatives. He then grabbed his backup camera and later discovered that he immortalized a color version of this decisive moment. But that day, Marc chose another image to send to Magnum before leaving for Moscow for the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution. The photo Marc has selected shows a menacing wall of National Guard soldiers dressed all in black, with helmet and gas mask, pointing their bayonets at the photographer’s lens. This terrifying vision represented for Marc Riboud the face of American imperialist power. It was only a few days later that he discovered this photo of the girl with the flower on his contact sheets, which would be published on the cover of Look magazine on December 30, 1969, under the title “Ultimate Confrontation.” The iconic photo would travel the world, emblematic of the era of the flower people and the rallying cry “Peace and Love.” It was these two photographs—the Tiananmen Square demonstration of 1965 and the flower girl of 1967—that motivated Pham Van Dong, the Prime Minister of the Vietnamese Communist Party, to invite Marc Riboud to visit Hanoi in 1968 and let him photograph Uncle Ho in his garden.
But 1968 was a year of upheaval: There was the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4th, followed by the assassination of Bob Kennedy on June 5th, and the Prague Spring crushed by Soviet tanks in August. In between, it was “May ’68” in France, and Marc Riboud was on the barricades! And finally, Nixon won the presidential election in November! In Vietnam it was the bloodiest fighting that took place with the Tet Offensive launched by North Vietnamese in the South. Therefore, before heading to North Vietnam to answer the invitation, Marc wanted to see the martyred city of Hue, devastated by the fierce fighting of the Tet Offensive of January-February 1968. Amongst the street scenes captured by Marc Riboud, we see the beauty in the horror, the order in the chaos. Marc’s emotion is palpable in this beautiful, seemingly peaceful and light-filled photo of the city of Hue, amidst the bomb-blasted roofs and the debris-strewn street, the “romantic” silhouette of this Vietnamese woman in an ao dai tunic and conical hat carrying a yoke with two large baskets of live poultry.
I’m reminded of what John Steinbeck wrote after Capa’s death (*6), which applies so well to Marc: “He knew that war could not be photographed, because it is above all an emotion. But he didn’t photograph this emotion by taking it from the side. He could show the horror of an entire people through the face of a child. His camera captured and held this emotion.” It is in the startled faces of children just out of school in a village on the coast of North Vietnam in 1969 (*7), were they shocked to see a Caucasian man after hearing so much propaganda against their enemies the French and the Americans? One can see that emotion also in the face of this child with the traumatized look in this photo of the father and son deported to a “new economic zone” north of Saigon in 1976, but we have no idea of the suffering of the children of the North and the South during and after the end of the war. And look at the horrified expression of this peasant woman in front of this big, obscene, unexploded bomb dropped in the courtyard of her farm in Phat Diem, can we imagine the violence of all these bombs and mines that had exploded? It can also be from the backs of children on their way to school, protected by thick straw vests, that we realize the futility of this cheap protection against explosions. It can be in the ubiquity of air-raid shelters captured by Marc in the streets of Hanoi or at the feet of leisurely tea drinkers by the lake that we realize the fragility of moments of respite and peace. It was this ambiguous emotion that Marc Riboud felt when he took these photos while thinking of his late mentor Robert Capa, who left us his famous anti-war quote: ” War is like an aging actress: more and more dangerous and less and less photogenic.”
It would take three more years for actress Jane Fonda to visit North Vietnam in 1972, further upsetting American public opinion. All this media hype would cease when North Vietnamese tanks broke through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon on April 30, 1975, exactly fifty years ago.
But Marc Riboud didn’t stop there. He returned to Saigon in 1976 and brought back these “less photogenic” images of the forced displacement of South Vietnamese people to the so-called new economic zones and socialist re-education camps where most of them would remain locked up for years.
In 2011, I paid a visit to Marc Riboud in his studio on Rue Monsieur Le Prince. He looked tired and sad. I asked him what went wrong, and he said to me in a weary voice full of regret and disappointment, “I just came back from North Vietnam, and they didn’t want to hold an exhibition of my photos of Vietnam… Here, take this box and open it. You see all these prints we had prepared for the exhibition? They didn’t even take one!” I wanted to give General Giap his portrait I made, but I was told he was hospitalized and couldn’t see me…” (*8)
By Jean Loh – The eyes of photography – May 6, 2025
(*1) Conversations with Marc Riboud 2010-2011.
(*2) See the Marc Riboud chapter in the DVD series “Contacts – Volume I” produced by Robert Delpire in 2000.
(*3) Baidu search on Ho Chi Minh’s 1965 visit to China.
(*4) During the Vietnam War between 1965 and 1973, the US military dropped a total of 7.5 million tons of bombs on North and South Vietnam, including Cambodia and Laos, twice as many as all the bombs dropped in World War II, not to mention 400,000 tons of napalm.
(5*) from Magnum Photos website: Marc Riboud made several trips to Vietnam in the 1960s, seeing for himself the war that he had heard reported on and debated over in the press. “It was hard not to feel sympathetic towards those Vietnamese putting up such a brave resistance to the relentless bombing,” he said, “and sympathy helps one understand a country, for a person, rather better than indifference or ‘objectivity’ (which is a spurious notion in any case).”
(6*) Quote from John Steinbeck in Richard Wheelan’s preface to Robert Capa’s autobiography “Slightly Out of Focus,” 1999 edition.
(*7) Photo on the cover of the now hard-to-find book: “Marc Riboud: Faces of North Vietnam,” text by Philippe Devillers, published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970, printed in the USA, with these words from Marc : I am indebted to Look Magazine for their support of my first trip to North Vietnam and for first publication of some of the photographs in this book”
(8*) Ho Chi Minh died September 2, 1969 aged 79, Vo Nguyen Giap died October 4, 2013 at the age of 102, Marc Riboud passed away on the 30th of August 2016 at the age of 93.