French photographer Marc Riboud dies at 93

World renowned French photographer Marc Riboud died at the age of 93, his family announced on Wednesday.

The news of the photojournalist's death appeared on Tuesday on his website underneath a photograph of him holding a camera with a quote reading "Seeing is the paradise of the soul."

One of his best known images depicts a man perched on the Eiffel Tower in 1953, Efe news reported.

Another was taken in 1967 during a demonstration in Washington against the war in Vietnam, in which a girl clutches a flower while standing in front of a line of armed soldiers.

Born in Lyon, France, in 1923, Riboud took his first photographs for the Universal Exhibition in Paris of 1937 with a small Vest-Pocket camera that his father gifted him on his 14th birthday.

He took part in the French Resistance against Nazi Germany in 1944 before embarking on engineering studies the following year.

Leaving the profession at the start of the 1950s to focus on photography, he met Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa -- two of photojournalism's founding fathers -- who invited him to join them at their agency, Magnum.

He was sent to London for his first assignment, before travelling to Asia and the Middle East over the course of his career.

After spending three months in the Soviet Union in 1960, he covered the independence of Algeria, and at the end of that year became one of the only Western photographers to enter North Vietnam during the war.

Since 1980, his work has been exhibited in Paris, London, New York, Beijing, Hong Kong and Bilbao.

--IANS

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