These youthful photos now gathered in a book, The Click Years, commented on by the journalist Gérard Lefort, Raymond Depardon took time to accept them. Yet they are full of charm, haloed by the radiant innocence of budding actors who have since become cinema legends: Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, Jean-Paul Belmondo… At Cannes Classics, a selection devoted to heritage films, will be presented other part of Click years, a 1984 documentary directed by Depardon himself and which returns to these famous images that their author long neglected, even despised.
“I am very wary of nostalgia, of complacency, of self-satisfaction, explains the 81-year-old photographer, met in his studio in the Paris suburbs. I didn’t really like them. But, once entrusted to a good shooter, all of a sudden, these photos that seemed like nothing became magnificent. There is the elegance of the people, and then the framing… You can see that I applied myself! » These photos take him back to his very first steps as a photographer, before he found his way, between documentary cinema and long-term reporting.
In 1958, at the age of 16, young Depardon, keen on photography, left Le Garet, his parents’ farm near Villefranche-sur-Saône (Rhône), to go to Paris. He quickly became a freelancer at the Dalmas agency, before co-founding Gamma in 1966. These were tough years when he pulled the devil by the tail, going from a portrait of a minister in the courtyard of the Elysée to a demonstration in front of the employers’ headquarters, then to a hideout in front of the hotel where a star is sleeping.
He speaks of it with a smile as of the time of his “paparazzades” : “We followed people, then we had the photos developed at night at Dalmas. But it wasn’t violent. he specifies, And no one blamed us for being there. » He adds : “It was a completely different time, because people were showing things. On the Champs-Elysées, when there was a premiere, the stars got out of their cars and everyone posed, filmmaker, actors… When I came back from my military service, in 1965, all that was over. »
“They needed us a little”
The actors, he says, are his first “prey” and his favorites. “They were people I loved, says Raymond Depardon. They were the easiest to photograph, because they kind of needed us. They weren’t very well known. Even Belmondo, at the time, hadn’t made many films. » And then cinema has always fascinated him. On the family farm, at the age of 12, he was already photographing magazines which featured the face of debutante Brigitte Bardot. In Paris, he began to haunt the dark rooms with his colleague from Dalmas Daniel Angeli, who had become a famous paparazzi. Both buy tickets for the lunchtime session, the cheapest, on the Grands Boulevards, a stone’s throw from the agency.
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