Photographer Yan Morvan had a taste for the margins and provocation. A key figure in 1980s photojournalism, he covered both the war in Lebanon and the conflict in Northern Ireland, but he became known above all for his taste for people on the margins of society: gangs, punks, skinheads, rockers, fetishists, prostitutes… An ardent photojournalist, always in search of extreme experiences and new subjects, he died on 20 September in Paris, at the age of 70, after fifty years of photography and twenty of books.
Son of a naval officer but off duty, a teenager nourished by stories ofIliad And a great fan of peplums, Yan Morvan quickly wants to write history, or even appear in it. In these 1970s, agitated by political debates, the film student from Vincennes began photographing demonstrations for the newspaper Releasewhile doing odd jobs. He was already attracted to beings apart: fascinated by a ramshackle rocker he met on the Place du Tertre in Paris in 1975, he spent three years immersing himself in the life of the blackjackets, the Parisian suburbs that roam between music, violence and motorcycles. His surprising work, in black and white, will be published in several pages in Paris match and in a book, Leather and wrestlingwith the journalist Maurice Lemoine (1977, ed. Jean-Claude Simoën).
Enough to be recruited into Göksin Sipahioglu’s Sipa agency, one of the three big “A” star agencies of the 1970s and 1980s (Sipa, Gamma, Sygma). He is always attracted to those who are out of the ordinary, from prostitutes to punks. Quite ironically for this “cryptosituational anarchist tendency”, But it was glamour photography that brought him his first real success: in 1981, in London, he immortalised Princess Diana on her wedding day, in the brief moment when she looked him straight in the eye from her carriage. He then immersed himself in the conflict in Northern Ireland, alongside young Catholics caught up in the Belfast and Derry “riots”, who threw stones as IRA leader Bobby Sands starved to death in prison.
“He liked to hang out with the “bad guys””
But his main subject at the time was Lebanon: he left that country at short notice in 1982, to replace the injured photographer Reza Deghati. A long collaboration with the American magazine followed. Week of newsAnd a stay that lasted almost three years, marked by bombings and multiple meetings: with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and the Lebanese president Amine Gemayel, with fighters of different religions, with civilians trying to survive. He will say that he was close to death twice, as in Tripoli, in the north of the country, where the Muslim Brotherhood took him for an Israeli agent, before pardoning him… on condition that he converted to Islam. In 1985, Yan Morvan returned to the place “for history”, armed with a large camera, capturing portraits of fighters and residents on the “green line” that separates Beirut in two. It is “Trojan War”As he calls it, it will be published in a huge book, Lebanon, in 2018, published by Photosyntheses.
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