Algeria
Dominique Berretty
Rapho
Dominique Berretty was born in Djakarta (Indonesia) on 7 September 1915. He began to take photographs of the occupation in Holland at the age of 14. He joined the resistance but was arrested and sent to Germany in 1943. Freed by the Americans, he returned to Holland and then went to Indonesia to collect his fathers’ estate. He joined the Dutch army and took photos. He then began to work on photo reportages independently in Holland, and covered the Marshall plan for a short while before moving to Paris in 1953.
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Towards the end of 1954 he created the Omicron agency with an American, Russ Melcher, and a Dutchman, Otto Van Noppen. He photographed politicians and worked as a freelance photographer for Paris Match. His most famous project is probably that of the revolution in Budapest in 1956 where he worked alongside Pedrazzini.
For a period of ten years - between 1958 and 1968 – he worked for Life magazine, covering subjects such as Churchill’s funeral, General de Gaulle, the Algerian war, and the Vietnam war. His main stories are to be found in issues of Life from that period and in the archives of the Rapho agency with which he worked throughout his career.
After Life closed down he worked mainly for Black Star New York. With the help of Rapho, who have provided us with his pictures, and Olivier Garros, a close friend of Berretty’s, and thanks also to Edward Behr’s book, Anyone here been raped and speaks English? which contains a great number of shared memories and anecdotes, we have tried to find out more about this photographer’s work whom we never had the opportunity of meeting during his lifetime.
Dominique Berretty died in September 1981, aged 65. As we cannot exhibit his entire body of work, we have chosen to focus only on the Algerian war. Visa pour l’image is proud to pay tribute to this talented photojournalist and to present the photographs his work.
