Amazing Portrait Photography by Marc Riboud ~ Vintage Everyday

Born 1923 in Saint-Genis-Laval, French photographer Marc Riboud photographed his first picture in 1937, using his father's Vest Pocket Kodak camera. As a young man during World War II, he was active in the French Resistance, from 1943 to 1945. After the war, he studied engineering at the École Centrale de Lyon from 1945 to 1948.

Until 1951, Riboud worked as an engineer in Lyon factories, but took a week-long picture-taking vacation, inspiring him to become a photographer.

Ines de la Fressange, Salvador Dalí, and James Baldwin taken by Marc Riboud

Over the next several decades, Riboud traveled around the world. In 1957, he was one of the first European photographers to go to China, and in 1968, 1972, and 1976, Riboud made several reportages on North Vietnam. Later he traveled all over the world, but mostly in Asia, Africa, the U.S. and Japan. Riboud has been witness to the atrocities of war (photographing from both the Vietnam and the American sides of the Vietnam War), and the apparent degradation of a culture repressed from within (China during the years of Chairman Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution). In contrast, he has captured the graces of daily life, set in sun-drenched facets of the globe (Fès, Angkor, Acapulco, Niger, Bénarès, Shaanxi), and the lyricism of child's play in everyday Paris.

Riboud's photographs have appeared in numerous magazines, including Life, Géo, National Geographic, Paris Match, and Stern. He twice won the Overseas Press Club Award, received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2009 Sony World Photography Awards and has had major retrospective exhibitions at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the International Center of Photography in New York.

Riboud was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in 1998. He died in Paris in 2016, at the age of 93.

These amazing photos are part of his work that he shot portraits of celebrities from the 1950s to 1990s.