Marc Riboud

Finding order in all the chaos creates fleeting joy. Beauty is everywhere, as is strangeness, which came my way in Shanghai last year in the form of a small plastic bag left in the garden of the Mandarin Yu: tied with a bow in the shape of a pair of ears, it looked like a little lost rabbit.

"I photograph the way a musician hums.

Looking is like breathing. When luck comes my way and offers me a good picture, joy is surely at hand."

For the past fifty years, Marc Riboud has traveled the world recording the harmony of landscapes and the beauty in faces in Angkor, Huang-Shan, Vietnam, Istanbul, India, Bangladesh, New York andChina. Riboud captures images of history in the making alongside those of everyday life. From a painter balanced like a dancer on the metal girders of the Eiffel Tower to a young girl facing down a rank of riflemen in protest of the Vietnam war, Riboud's photographs reveal a deep passion for seeing, an intrinsic compassion for the human struggle, and an intense and insatiable desire to understand and to comprehend. While many of his photographs depict the anguish of war, others catch the evanescent delight of a swim in a sun-dappled river or children learning to whistle in a Shanghai street.

This retrospective book-which indudes Riboud's most famous photographis as well as unpublished vintage prints from Leeds in 1954, from Africa, and from Europe-is the first to span his entire, remarkable career.