Raymond Depardon: Desert

The African desert as seen by Raymond Depardon through 60 years of political reporting, photographic commissions, film shoots and personal explorations. Seven countries, their landscapes, peoples and conflicts, immortalized in black and white by a legend of photojournalism.

From his beginnings as a photojournalist on his first trip to Algeria in 1960, Raymond Depardon instantly developed a deep and intimate attachment to the Saharan desert and its various peoples. His photographic and cinematographic eye was particularly drawn to the different regions of Chad, from the Chadian civil war, during which he followed the rebels into the desert (1970), covered the Claustre affair (1975), the attack on FayaLargeau (1978) and Goukouni Oueddei's accession to power (1979), to the filming of Un homme sans l'Occident among the azzas of Borkou (2001). His reports took him on the road with Tuareg refugees in Mali (1974) and ParisDakar pilots in Libya and Niger (1990); for the shooting of his films Empty Quarter (1984) and La Captive du désert (1989), he crossed Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt, Chad, Niger, Mali and Mauritania; first in the company of Claudine Nougaret, then with their children, he shared his love of the Sahara, the Sahel and their inhabitants. This book is a photographic tribute to the African deserts that have accompanied Raymond Depardon's career and life for over sixty years.