Raymond Depardon: Passages pays tribute to one of the great witnesses of our time, whose silent narratives and inner journeys have profoundly influenced his contemporaries as well as subsequent generations of photographers.

This new exhibition at the Magnum Gallery celebrates Depardon’s prolific career, as an iconic figure in French photography. Through more than 40 prints from a dozen major series, the exhibition traces the various journeys and projects that have marked the artist's work, in both black and white and color.

Essential series such as Errance, La France, Correspondance New-Yorkaise, and Communes are presented alongside lesser-known works, unfamiliar to the wider public. The exhibition also reveals, for the first time, photographs taken during Depardon's most recent trip to the United States, just before the Covid-19 pandemic closed the borders. In the spirit of 1930s American photographers such as Walker Evans, Depardon traveled along small roads to capture and convey the essence of the American pastoral. These softly colored, deserted scenes evoke film sets, reflecting the cinematic eye that often defines his work.

The works in this exhibition together reveal the sensitivity, commitment, and poetic vision with which Depardon observes the world. A member of Magnum Photos agency since 1979, Depardon defines photography as “the elogy of each moment,” documenting reality with rare humanity. Whether capturing the hustle and bustle of a city like New York, the silence of a desert landscape, or the rural dwellings of his origins, his work transcends the constraints of reportage to attain a deeply introspective dimension.

The exhibited prints—portraits or landscapes, in color or black and white—testify to the richness of Depardon's photographic language, as well as the diversity of places, atmospheres, and people he has photographed, always with humility and precision.

As Bruno Racine wrote in the preface to La France: “Depardon's geography is unique, arbitrary, personal, deliberately born of ‘the pain of the frame’ and ‘the joy of light’.”