Jean Ribière

Jean Ribière is a distinguished French photographer, who was the national vice-president of the A.N.J.R.P.C. (Association Nationale des Journalistes Reporters Photographes et Cinéastes), of which the president was Robert Doisneau and the principal members were Henri Cartier-Bresson and Raymond Depardon.

Born in Niort in 1922, Jean Ribière began his career in the photo department of the the Indépendant newspaper of the Pyrénées Orientales in 1940. In 1944, he married Micheline Vialle, who was also a journalist. Jean, an excellent photographer and Micheline, an important journalist, decided to create their own press agency, “Ribière Presse Photos". They were soon selling their reports to more than a hundred newspapers and magazines in France and overseas, including L'Express, L'Aurore, Match, Keystone, and BBC London. As he was recognized for his constant work in the defense of copyrights, Jean committed his time to the leading national professional photography associations.

In the 1940s they devoted their work to France during the occupation and liberation. The agency was taking on more importance and had a growing reputation.

In the 1950s, they diversified their subjects further to the begin studying French everyday life. In particular, they shot many exceptional and rare photographs in each of the French departments where they spent several years in order to highlight the traditions, the Romanesque art, the rural life, and the small trades.

Alongside this discovery of France, they took on sports journalism (rugby, cycling, motorsport, etc.) and reporting on the legal system and the courts.

During the 1960's, Jean Ribière's talent was recognized through international photography exhibitions where he received numerous first prizes, notably in Andorra in 1962 where he received the gold medal and special jury prize.

In the 1970s, they changed the direction of their agency by offering European and American publishers images of different aspects of life in French regions. As customer satisfaction had always been important to the couple, they also began reporting from outside France, in Spain, Portugal, Belgium and Italy.

In the 1980s, the success of the agency and too many orders from abroad led Jean and Micheline Ribière to reduce their travel. They were now dedicated solely to running the photo collection and providing images for books, magazines and TV shows. In 1989 Jean Ribière died, a few years before his wife, and bequeathed to his daughter, Hélène Tabes, all his work: 120,000 photographic documents (90,000 negatives black-and-white, 30,000 slides and about 2,000 prints), as well as 150 texts of documentary reports, covering the period of 1941-1989.

Hélène Tabes has since personally taken over the management of the photo archives, and entrusted the national and international distribution of the fund to the SIPA PRESS agency and later to GAMMA-RAPHO where it is represented today.

On August 21, 2002, the Municipality of Perpignan paid tribute to Jean Ribière by naming a street in the city after him, in a new neighborhood dedicated to the greatest photojournalists worldwide.