Marie-Laure de Decker’s Vietnam war self-portrait

Throughout her 40-year career, De Decker rarely photographed war head-on, preferring instead to explore around the edges of a conflict – soldiers in repose, civilians making their way through the chaos. A lone woman in what was an entirely male-dominated profession, she had travelled to Vietnam because she wanted to be taken seriously as a photojournalist, but when she got there she found herself averse to shooting scenes of violence. “She hated the sight of blood,” recalls her son and archivist Pablo Saavedra de Decker. “She decided early on that she would not make money out of people spilling their guts. She wanted to make pictures of the dignity and honour of human beings.”

De Decker, who died in 2023, went on to cover wars and freedom struggles in Yemen, Chad, South Africa and Chile. Her work, the subject of a retrospective at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris starting next month, is remarkable for its compassion, intimacy and relative stillness. The physical conflict is almost always out of shot. “What I saw of war were the little things,” De Decker once said. “It wasn’t the bomb that exploded in your face.”

Marie-Laure de Decker: L’image comme engagement is at MEP in Paris from 4 June to 28 September

Photograph by Marie-Laure de Decker/Courtesy MEP, Paris