Yan Morvan, photographer of wars and marginalized people, has died

He covered more than twenty conflicts, but also photographed people on the fringes of society or sites haunted by the past. The photojournalist died on September 20, at the age of 70.

“RTelling a story starts at the doorstep “, Yan Morvan asserted. He extended his curiosity from his street corner to the entire world. A legend of photojournalism, winner of two World Press, the French photographer died on September 20, 2024 at the age of 70.

Northern Ireland, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Kosovo… Known for his steamroller-like energy and for not mincing his words, Yan Morvan has covered more than twenty conflicts from the 1980s to the 2020s. His moving photo of a soldier holding the hand of another soldier buried under the ruins of the French forces’ headquarters in Beirut, demolished after a suicide attack on October 23, 1983, made the front page of Paris Match and made an impression. Two years ago, he was still in Mariupol, Ukraine, for the magazine Marianne. ” He didn’t let go of the piece “, says his colleague Éric Bouvet, with whom he created the Hexagone series (2017-2019), composed of portraits of French people. He knew how to take the time to stay in place, to be able to push doors and be accepted. “, until he integrates, photographing instinctively, as if melted into social groups different from his own.

Before exploring the war zones for the Sipa agency, Yan Morvan – who loved stories of theIliad when he was a child, in Antibes – studied mathematics. Dreaming of making peplums, he quickly switched to film school in Vincennes, much to the dismay of his father, who cut off his funding. Broke, engaging in petty theft to survive, Morvan managed to sell photos to Release, starting out in the 1970s with a photographic investigation “down his street” on the black jackets.

The photojournalist continued this exploration of marginal youth groups in the late 1980s, when the Red Warriors fought against the skinheads, also taking an interest in the rise of hip-hop in the suburbs. The book Gangs Story, which traces these different trajectories, was first released in 2013. Before being withdrawn following a court decision: a young man, photographed when he was a minor and a neo-Nazi in the 1980s, assured that he had not given his authorization. The work finally reappeared in 2022.

Picking up the pieces

With several lives, Yan Morvan has escaped death many times. During a fight in a café in the 1970s, then after being sequestered and tortured by Guy Georges (the future serial killer of eastern Paris), who was then his fixer in Parisian squats. In Lebanon, too. “1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, I lived four years in the hell of war. By making money from horror, I became cynical ” he wrote in War reporter, designed with Aurélie Taupin in 2012 (Edition de La Martinière).

He then returned to what interested him: “the little people”. Those who remain on the edge of the world. In 1985, he produced a series with a view camera on the people of Beirut living along the Green Line, the 15 kilometres that separated Muslims from Christians. More recently, as part of the Grande Commande photographique, he focused on taking portraits, again with a view camera, of crack users. “How can we continue to tell the story? We have to pick up the pieces,” he wrote in Battlefields, published in 2015 and which lists the sites where bloody battles took place in the past. What remains of them? Parking lots, parks, woods haunted by the massacres that took place there. A work classified by critics in the “art” category, which irritated him: according to him, it was still and always photojournalism.