In September 2008, two years before Le Bal opened, with Raymond Depardon and Diane Dufour we launched La Fabrique du Regard, Le Bal's educational platform. Our intention was that young people should understand the implications of images by looking afresh at their different statu...

17.05.2013[ read full story ]

He is the best known of the four musketeers who founded Gamma in November 1966, taking charge of the agency after the parting of the ways. I wanted to hear his side of the story, but the photographer, who took President François Holland’s official portrait one year ago, is dif...

13.05.2013[ read full story ]

“to have enemies on should be worthy of it,” said Roger Thérond, according to Hubert Henrotte. “Monique,” as almost everyone called her, has a few among the photographers at Gamma and Sygma, but none among the celebrities she has had photographed for more than 40 years.

13.05.2013[ read full story ]

He arrives at the appointment on a motorcycle wearing a reporter’s jacket. With a steady gaze and steady feet, Alain Noguès was one of the first partners of the Sygma agency. Of the members of the team responsible for the agency’s success, Nogues is one of the oldest, but he’s still ...

13.05.2013[ read full story ]

Issy-les-Moulineaux, Wednesday, April 24, 2013, around noon. Henri Bureau had been driving in circles. “I’ve got other things to do,” he groaned into his cell phone. Finally he parked his Citroën C4 on a corner and I met him. The weather is nice. We sit outside in a Paris suburb....

13.05.2013[ read full story ]

May 1973. Night has fallen on the quiet Rue Auguste Vacquerie, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, 500 meters from the Arc de Triomphe. At number 4, a group of young people are cramming boxes into a dark purple Daimler parked next to a Jaguar E-Type. They are photographers from ...

13.05.2013[ read full story ]

For 30 years, he was at the head of a group of photographers hunting for scoops. They made the covers of the world’s biggest magazines. Then the meticulous manager of Sygma’s interests was carried away, not by the revolution he had anticipated, but by his weakness.

13.05.2013[ read full story ]

Judge Van Ruymbeke from the financial division of the Court of Paris recently made headlines during the affaire Cahuzac (named after the former official of the French Ministry of Finance). He also has on his desk a less publicized case: the end of the Sygma agency. It is the story ...

13.05.2013[ read full story ]

It was an evening in May forty years ago, 1973. Disgruntled photographers from the Gamma agency decided to haul away their archives to open a new agency, Sygma. From the schism and the competition that ensued (complicated by a third agency, Sipa), the Golden Age of French Photojour...

13.05.2013[ read full story ]

On March 19, 2013, three judges of the Court of Appeal of Paris ordered the photographer Marie-Laure de Decker to pay Gamma-Rapho 5000€ in addition to the 5000€ she had already been sentenced to pay them. The decision was deemed outrageous by the plaintiff, her friends and many photojo...

25.03.2013[ read full story ]