The daily Astorian., January 29, 2016, WEEKEND EDITION, Image 19

FRIDAYEXTRA !
The Daily Astorian
Friday, January 29, 2016
Weekend Edition
Joshua Bessex/The Daily Astorian
Pierre Toutain-Dorbec.
‘The decisive moment’
Photography, like life, is often measured in seconds
By JOSHUA BESSEX
The Daily Astorian
P
ierre Toutain-Dorbec is a French photographer who has traveled the
world doing photojournalism and publishing more than 40 books.
He worked as a war correspondent
during the Vietnam War and, in the 1980s,
collaborated with the Dalai Lama on two
books about Tibet.
Toutain-Dorbec lives in Cannon Beach
where he and his wife, Claudia, own the
Cannon Beach Hotel.
The Daily Astorian spoke with him
earlier this month about his thoughts on
photography.
Pierre Toutain-Dorbec
Cambodia Refugee Camp.
Q: What got you into photography?
A: It’s very simple. I studied in the
(Atelier de la Grande Chaumière) and I
like to travel. And photography was the
only medium I could use to be able to do
it and travel at the same time. It was at the
very end of the ’60s and the beginning of
the ’70s when I started, which was a good
time for photojournalism.
The magazines were quite beautiful
at the time and they were the only
source of information when something
was happening in the world. TV was
not a competition at all yet. Digital was
nonexistent. The world was going at kind
of a slow pace and we had a budget where
we got to work. So it was a good business
at that time and a good way to travel.
That’s the only reason.
Otherwise I would have gone into
painting or sculpting like some of my other
colleagues at school. But it did not happen.
Q: What drove you to do war
correspondence?
A: I was born just after (World War
II), so I saw the consequences when I was
going to school and the city of Normandy
was totally destroyed. I was going through
the middle of the huge amounts of breaks
in stones from the houses and the old
country was in reconstruction everywhere.
Of course the consequences were a big
subject in the family because we lost a
lot of people in the family — which was
a big blow. In the family over 20 people
passed. My father lost most of his brothers
and sisters. My grandfather fought World
War I, World War II, and he was a photog-
rapher. My uncle, my father, I grew up
listening to their stories. And there in the
time after the war their feeling was ‘this
should not happen ever again.’ They were
thinking after World War I it was the end.
It was so awful. My grandfather has told
me he was totally blown away when just
20 years later, they started another war.
So I have been raised in this anti-war, not
movement, but feelings that was going on
in the family and everywhere else in the
area.
See PIERRE, Page 3C
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