Travelling alone, internationally acclaimed photographer and filmmaker Raymond Depardon spent six years capturing his home country with a large format camera. This long, solitary road trip provided fertile ground for the creation – with his long-time partner and collaborator Claudine Nougaret – of an extraordinary travel journal.
The journey returned Depardon to important places from his past as a reporter – Chad, Venice, Cannes – and to a wealth of previously unseen footage from his archive – an interview with Jean-Bedel Bokassa, film of Jean-Luc Godard, extraordinary glimpses of private and public life.
Intimate, compelling, revelatory, “Journal de France” offers a unique portrait of a country and its landscapes, an overview of a truly remarkable career and a fascinating resume of the development of the photographic art over the past half century. —wildbunch.biz
Raymond Depardon is a photographer, a journalist and a filmmaker. He was born into a family of farmers in 1942 in Burgundy and went to Paris in 1958, wishing to be a photographer. He was first taken on as a messenger in an agency and was sent to take photos of an opening-night at the cinema: the movie was none other than Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. He finally established his own agency, Gamma, together with three reporters, in 1966 ‘not for money but for the freedom’. He suggested to set up a cinema department: ‘we bought an Eclair- camera and tried to make news-films for television in addition to taking news-photograhs… It was then that I learned to hold the camera." When Depardon films people, he is silent. If one has the impression that he always keeps his eyes lowered in the face of the world’s miseries, it is untrue. Raymond Depardon looks as through a lattice and reacts like quicksilver, keeping his deepest, innermost emotion secret, and allows his pictures to speak for themselves… read more
