Marc Riboud was a French photographer best known for capturing politically charged moments during the Cultural Revolution in China, the Vietnam War, and protests in the United States during the 1960s. Rather than frame the entire scene, he discovered images that would have otherwise been forgotten to history. “The eye is made to see and not to think. A good photograph is a surprise,” the artist once said.

In 1937 at the Exposition Universelle in Paris Marc Riboud took his first photos using a small vest pocket Kodak given to him by his father for his 14th birthday. It was while employed in a factory as an engineer that Riboud began photographing more seriously. In 1953 his photograph of a painter on the Eiffel Tower appears in Life Magazine. This is his first official publication. He is invited by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa to join the exclusive and renowned Magnum Photos agency.

In one his most iconic works, the anti-war image Flower Child (1967), Riboud captured the intimate moment of a young protestor holding a flower towards National Guardsmen poised with bayonets outside the Pentagon. The artist’s photographs appeared in several magazine publications, including Life, National Geographic, and Stern. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.