The French photographer Marie-Laure de Decker, who has died aged 75 of heart failure, was one of the first women to gatecrash the male-dominated world of photojournalism. As a young woman she endured being in front of the lens, as a model, to help her meet her goal: to be behind it. She had to fight to succeed, and said: “If you’re a woman you’re never taken seriously.” Yet she reported from the Vietnam war, the struggle for independence in Mozambique, riots in Chile and the oppression of apartheid in South Africa.
She did not photograph the horrors that she witnessed. Instead, she brought her compassionate eye to bear on the victims of conflict: the displaced elderly, combatants in quiet moments, women and children. She said: “I am proud not to show blood. I censor myself as soon as the shot is taken. I have moral principles.”
She had a deep love for Africa, having been born in the then French colony of Algeria. Arriving in Chad in 1975, she met the Toubou rebels fighting against the Chadian and French armies. She lived with them for two years in the heart of the Sahara, taking black and white portraits of the fighters posing proudly. “Colour is never as beautiful as in real life, so it’s in black and white that people’s souls show,” she said. De Decker walked and suffered with the Toubou and they respected her, embraced her and renamed her “Marie de l’or”: Mary of Gold.
The youngest of three sisters, Marie-Laure was born in the Algerian city of Bône (now Annaba), to French parents, Michel de Decker and Marie-Antoinette (nee Le Sourd). Michel was a war hero, having fought in the Spanish civil war and the second world war. Later he found work in the French colonies, including taking his family to spend a year in a remote village in Ivory Coast, where he searched for gold.
They moved to Paris, where Marie-Laure attended boarding school and spent her free time in the Louvre museum, the only place she was allowed to visit unaccompanied. School was not for her, and she dropped out at 15. She enrolled at Penninghen School of Art in 1963 and discovered freedom and photography. With piercing green eyes and a noble beauty, she reluctantly turned to modelling to earn money. At the cinema, she saw the Oscar-winning documentary The Anderson Platoon, about an American unit in the jungles of Vietnam, and was inspired.
After a brief flirtation with film-making, she chose photography. She admired the courage and storytelling of the photojournalist Gilles Caron of the young French photo agency, Gamma, and she resolved to join it.
Friends lent her Leica cameras, and she shot the May 68 Paris protests and took a series of portraits of her heroes, the forgotten men of surrealism. She tracked down Man Ray, Luis Buñuel and Marcel Duchamp and took her work to a magazine editor who told her: “Come back when they’re dead.”
Undeterred, she saved up her modelling fees and bought her own Leica and, in 1970, aged 23, a one-way ticket to Saigon. There she worked for the US magazine Newsweek for two years, travelling around the country on a motorbike with a Vietnamese friend, named “Twiggy” after the skinny British model.
On her return to Paris she was accepted into Gamma. De Decker was the agency’s sole female photographer and, when she arrived, one man asked if she was there to do the cleaning. She felt “very despised. I was surrounded by macho photographers who thought they were being clever.” But she was courageous and determined. She took portraits of politicians; most famously of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing watching himself win the 1974 election on television (he subsequently wooed her desperately, despite their ideological differences); and celebrities such as Charlotte Rampling and François Truffaut. She reported from Yemen and Bolivia and then, in 1975, she went to Chad.
While staying with the Toubou rebels, she and a fellow photographer, Raymond Depardon, were instrumental in securing the release of a French hostage, the archaeologist Françoise Claustre, and the women remained friends. De Decker also spent time with the Wodaabe tribe, nomadic cattle herders in the south of the country, “people who love each other, who have nothing to do with our world. They produce what they need and use only what they can master. It’s the total opposite of us.” Although she had 50 rolls of film seized by the French army – the return of which she sought unsuccessfully – a book of her work, Pour Le Tchad, was published in 1978.
In 1980, following work in Mozambique, Russia and Tibet, she left Gamma. Her early enthusiasm for the agency had gone, and she wanted to be independent: “I want to photograph only the ones I love.”
In Paris, she had met Teo Saavedra, a Chilean revolutionary, and their son, Pablo, was born in 1983. Later that year, the couple travelled to Santiago: Teo organised attacks with the armed resistance, De Decker documented unrest during the 10th anniversary of Pinochet’s coup.
She shot fashion for Glamour and Harpers & Queen magazines and took memorable portraits of Serge Gainsbourg and Catherine Deneuve. De Decker visited South Africa in 1985, and would return there regularly, recording the struggles of ordinary people living under the brutal yoke of apartheid.
In 1986, now separated from Teo, she met the criminal defence lawyer Thierry Lévy, and they had a son, Balthazar, the following year. Together they published a book, Garçons et Filles, in 1987, her portraits from around the world accompanied by his text, and she continued to work, shooting for clients including Yves Saint Laurent. Then, in 1993, she travelled to Bosnia to cover the civil war. It was a mistake. She later said: “Since Bosnia, there’s a side of my job I can’t stand. Bosnia was too sad, too hard. It killed me.”
She retreated to Rabastens, on the river Tarn, a place she knew and loved from childhood. Until 2007, when her health was affected after a car accident in Chad, she took her boys to visit the Wodaabe people every year. She wanted to record the tribe’s culture and celebrate their lives: “They are people I admire, and I have decided to photograph each and every face.”
In 2001, the first major exhibition of her work, Vivre Pour Voir, opened at MEP (the Maison Européenne de la Photographie) in Paris, with another show at the Visa Pour l’image festival in Perpignan in 2006. When Gamma folded in 2009, De Decker became embroiled in legal battles to try and have her material and copyright restored to her. The cases were long and arduous, and left a bitter taste.
In 2013, her outstanding work depicting the realities of war was acknowledged with the Albert Kahn International Planet prize.
Levy died in 2017. De Decker is survived by her sons.
• Marie-Laure de Decker, photographer, born 2 August 1947; died 15 July 2023
