What’s the point of taking pictures in a world full of images? What is a good photo? Can we still dream of making a living from photography? After a career spanning 50 years, the French photographer has answers to these questions, which he has often been asked. Also his photos are answers.
It is difficult to sum up Patrick Chauvel’s career. His career is a compendium of the conflicts of the last 50 years in the world and the story is an epic.
Patrick Chauvel, born in 1949, is the son of Jean-François Chauvel (journalist) and the nephew of the director Pierre Schoendoerffer. The latter and others were a source of inspiration for the man who became a war correspondent, a photographer, a documentary filmmaker and a writer.
Patrick Chauvel covered 34 wars and was wounded 5 times.
From 1970, he worked for the Sipa agency. He reported on the Northern Irish conflict, the civil war in Mozambique and then Cambodia, where he was wounded in 1974.
A year later, he was hired by the founder and boss of Sygma, combining photo reports and documentaries, again in Ireland, Angola and Portugal. It was also the beginning of the civil war in Lebanon, where Patrick Chauvel was taken prisoner in 1978. Released, back in France, he travels to Zaire to cover the Kolwezi operation. A year later, he attends the first Islamist demonstrations in Pakistan, then in Iran where he is wounded in the ankle and forced to return.
At the end of the 1970s and in the 1980s, he travelled to Afghanistan to cover the Russian invasion and often travelled to Latin America (to Nicaragua in 1979 and later to El Salvador, Peru and Colombia). His photos of the Medellin airport massacre earned him the Kodak Award in 1988. The following year, in Panama, Patrick Chauvel was seriously wounded by an M16 firing (“friendly fire”, as the photographer mischievously points out) that would result in a serious stomach operation.
Convalescent, Patrick Chauvel devoted a report to urban violence in New York (1990). The following year, he embarks in Haiti with the boat-people towards the United States but the boat capsizes after three days at sea. The mid-1990s brought its share of conflicts, covered by the photographer in Somalia (1993), Bosnia (1994) and Chechnya (1995) with the Russian offensive. One of his reports won a World Press Photo Award and the Angers Prize in 1996.
That year, Patrick Chauvel left the Sygma agency. The extreme violence experienced in Chechnya confirms his belief that, rather than images, words are now necessary to express his understanding of conflicts. The photographer explores documentary language. In 1998, he makes a film with Antoine Novat entitled “Rapporteurs de guerre” [War Reporters], which asks questions to war reporters about the reasons for their involvement in this profession. Echoing the questions asked to others, Patrick Chauvel published his own vision in 2000 with “Rapporteur de guerre” [War Reporter] (in the singular).
During this period, Patrick Chauvel made a series of documentaries for French television: violence against women in Algeria, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the traumatisms of Chechen children, the distress of Iraqi artists, violence in Pakistan, Thailand, on the border with Afghanistan, etc.
With the 2010s, Patrick Chauvel takes up photo reporting in Afghanistan, but also the coverage of the Arab springs (Egypt), some of which degenerate into civil wars (Libya, Syria, Iraq).
As a lecturer, Patrick Chauvel is always more involved with the preoccupation of transmission. In 2014, thanks to Swiss friends, he created an association which is the precursor of the Patrick Chauvel Foundation designated to bring together his comprehensive work, to create a platform for reflection on the profession of war reporter and to act as a relay between generations by highlighting the work of little-known photographers.
He is also one of the co-founders, with Rémy Ourdan, of the WARM Foundation, which works on the commemoration of contemporary conflicts in the world and is involved with researchers from various backgrounds in a reflection on war and conflict resolution.
Finally, Patrick Chauvel is a regular visitor to the Bayeux-Calvados War Correspondents’ Prize, over which he presides in October 2009, when he presented his exhibition entitled “Guerre-ici” [War-here] on the walls of Bayeux: photomontages (which place, for example, a battle scene taken in Lebanon at the foot of the Sacred Heart), to alert those who want to ignore conflicts, by imagining them far away from them.
In 2019, Patrick Chauvel receives the Bayeux Calvados prize. The same year his archives – 380,000 photos and 1,000 hours of documentaries – are collected and gathered at the Caen memorial, where a room is dedicated to his work.