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Mark Riboud vs. Vladimir Lagrange?

Both Riboud and Lagrange are famous photographers in their respective home countries, France and Russia. They worked in the same epoch, but never together. Riboud worked for the world-known ‘brand’ agency, Magnum. The other worked in a country where they didn’t know what the word ‘brand’ meant. He took photographs for The Soviet Union magazine and presented the country of the Soviets in a better light in France.

Mark Riboud was born in Lyon in 1923. During World War II he joined the French Resistance. In 1948 he entered the Ecole Centrale to become an engineer but opted out for photography, which brought him huge success. In 1951 he became part of Magnum Photos of which he was vice-president for Europe from 1959. Vladimir Lagrange was born in Moscow in 1939. In the 1950s and 1960s he worked for TASS news agency, and later for the The Soviet Union magazine. He travelled all over the country and took numerous propaganda reportage photographs and a lot for himself that he could not publish in Moscow due to censorship. The genres of the reportage and artistic photography are not juxtaposed in this exposition, but are complimentary. The curators of the current exhibition at the Zurab Tsereteli gallery surely enjoyed their time looking through the archives of the two photographers when preparing this exhibition. Between them, they have thousands of negatives from the 1950s. The result of their selection is on display in July.