Photographer Unchained
Jean-Pierre Laffont
I began taking photographs very young. When I was a teenager, I did scuba diving and dreamed of becoming an underwater photographer. My mother gave me my first camera, which I didn’t use underwater, but rather to take my first photos during the Algerian war. I had an eye for photography, but at that time there weren’t any photography schools in France. So, I went to the school with the best reputation in Europe: the École des Arts et Métiers in Vevey, Switzerland. That’s where I became a photographer. It was a job that promised adventure, and I wanted to bear witness to the times. I wanted to be free to explore the world, cover current events and tell stories.
Preview
At the beginning of my career as a photojournalist in the 1960s, photographers were not highly regarded and worked in complete anonymity. Their photos were never signed and very often belonged to the clients who commissioned them. But I was lucky enough to join Gamma, a little agency that had opened in Paris. Gamma was a photographer’s dream, with complete freedom and autonomy: an agency run by photographers for photographers. It was based on a very simple principle: 50/50. The agency and the photographer shared everything, both earnings and expenses, and we retained ownership of our photos. I really liked the set-up.
I’m a loner. I always liked working alone and only on what I felt was important. The financial aspect didn’t interest me; the only thing that motivated me was my desire to inform people. I took care of everything: establishing itineraries, choosing my stories, building my reports, booking plane tickets and appointments, paying expenses, developing films, writing texts, and even sometimes editing my photos. I only liked working speculatively, that is to say, without an assignment, so that I didn’t have to sacrifice my freedom. No deadlines, no constraints and no specific requests, just my desire to cover such and such an event.
I liked doing everything: covering current affairs and the big social and economic events, being a street photographer, taking photographs of French celebrities in New York and American stars on film sets in Los Angeles, or exploring countries throughout the world.
Everything has its golden age, and we had ours. It was a time when I was able to be a photojournalist, an adventurer, a traveler and a concerned photographer. Above all, I wanted to be free, free to take photographs of whatever I wanted, free to tell stories in my own way, free to pursue my passion for photojournalism in whichever countries I chose. They were the golden years of analogue photojournalism. I was lucky enough to live through that period when we could work in complete freedom.
Jean-Pierre Laffont New York, April 21, 2025
