Raymond Depardon, born in France in 1942, began taking photographs on his family farm in Garet at the age of 12. He joined the Dalmas agency in Paris in 1960 as a reporter, and in 1966 he co-founded the Gamma agency, reporting from all over the world. From 1974 to 1977, as a photographer and filmmaker, he covered the kidnap of a French ethnologist, François Claustre, in northern Chad. Alongside his photographic career, he began to make documentary films: 1974, Une Partie de Campagne and San Clemente. He has since made eighteen feature-length films and published forty-seven books. Depardon joined Magnum in 1978. He is based in Paris.