Gilles Caron

Gilles Caron began his career in 1965 at the Apis agency (Agence parisienne d’information sociale), where he devoted his early photo-reportages to French current affairs: demonstrations, Cabinet meetings, as well as film shoots and theatre premieres. In December 1966, he joined Raymond Depardon at the Gamma agency and covered all the dramatic events of his time: the Six-Day War (1967), the famine in Biafra (1968), the Vietnam war (1968), Catholic demonstrations and the Londonderry riots in Northern Ireland, and the crushing of the Prague Spring (1969). In 1970, he travelled to Cambodia, where he went missing on the 5th April on Route 1, which links Phnom Penh to Vietnam, in an area controlled by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. He thus became a legend and one of the most famous French photographers of the 20th century.

The Gilles Caron collection comprises around 100,000 negatives and the associated contact sheets, 1,500 vintage prints produced between 1964 and 1970, a press review of 600 publications featuring his images, and 5,000 archival documents. Housed at Fort Saint-Cyr (Yvelines) since August 2020, it has now been transferred to the collections of the Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie (MPP).

The donation agreement signed in 2023 marks the inclusion of this body of work in the national collections, with a view to both disseminate the collection and to promote its value.