Photography by Bruno Barbey
Born into a diplomatic family in February of 1941, Bruno Barbey was a Moroccan-born French photographer whose work covered a span of nearly fifty years. He studied graphic arts and photography at Switzerland’s Ecole des Arts et Métiers in the city of Vevey. During the 1960s, Barbey was
commissioned by Editions Rencontre, a publishing house in Lausanne, to photograph in African and European countries.
In 1966, Barbey began a long career with the international Magnum Photos, one of the first photographic cooperatives owned and administered entirely by its members. He later became an Associate member in 1966, and a full member in 1968, at which time he produced a series of work on the student riots in Paris. Barbey continued his career at Magnum Photos as vice-president for Europe in 1978 and 1979, and as President of Magnum International from 1992 to 1995.
Beginning in 1979, Bruno Barbey worked on a two year photographic project in Poland to document the socio-political changes occurring in the country. In a time when the country was divided between Christianity and Communism, he and his family
traveled, while living in a camper, over forty thousand miles over an eight month period. In spite of the strict surveillance of visitors to Poland at the time, Barbey was able to take many informal photographs of the local people; seventy-five photographs of this series were published in his 1982 “Portrait of Poland”.
Although he photographed throughout many countries, Barbey became best known for his coverage of world conflicts, including civil wars in Nigeria, Vietnam, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, Cambodia, and the liberation war in Bangladesh. His work has been published in over twenty books, which included photographic projects in Portugal, Bombay, Kenya, Italy, Istanbul, and Naples, among others. Barbey did the cinematography on Éric Rohmer’s 1963 film “The Bakery Girl of Monceau” and had worked on eight films with director Caroline Thiénot, including the 2015 short film “Passages”.
In 1999, Paris’s art museum Petit Palais organized a large exhibition of photographs that Barbey had taken in Morocco during the previous three decades.
In 2015, La Maison Européene de la Photographic, based in Paris, presented a retrospective exhibition of Barbey’s work, which traveled internationally in 2016. A retrospective book of his work, “Passages” was also released in the same year.
In 2016, Bruno Barbey was elected as member of the French Academy of Fine Arts. He had received many awards for his work, including the French National Order of Merit. Known for his free and harmonious use of color, Barbey died in November of 2020, at the age of seventy-nine, in Orbais l’Abbaye, France. His photographs have been exhibited internationally and are in numerous museum collections.
All photos credited to Magnum Photos.