In 1964, when Jean-Pierre Laffont was in his late 20s, he decided to move to New York to forge a career as a photojournalist. In Paris, he’d already worked with the fashion photographers Sam Lévin and Alexander Choura. He’d also shot the rising star Ava Gardner, in Rome. But, all in all, fashion bored him. He was attracted to grit, not glamour.
It was the right time to make the move. The U.S. was in political turmoil. In 1965, the first American soldiers were deployed to Vietnam. In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The Black Panther Party was gaining power, and New York was on the verge of bankruptcy. “I was trying to find a good story,” Laffont, now 88, tells me, “to make a start and have my name shining like it had in Europe.”
He was attracted to grit, not glamour.
When he arrived, despite speaking little English, Laffont aimed his camera at protesters, icons, and children in the Bronx. “In 1966, I took a photograph of this child playing baseball with a broomstick and a tin can. He was joyful against all odds. It always impressed me how people could be happy in the worst places.”
In 1968, the same year he was offered a job as a foreign correspondent for the French photo agency Gamma—which he accepted—Laffont captured New Yorkers on the West Side Highway celebrating the centennial of the Statue of Liberty. In 1970, he traveled to Yale, where the Black Panthers were protesting the murder of their fellow party member Alexander Rackley. “The incident was known as the New Haven Nine,” Laffont says.
Beginning in the late 60s, Laffont documented the construction of the World Trade Center, both from the ground and the sky. When the towers were completed but still mostly empty, he took a photograph of the homeless people who were squatting in their shadows. “There was no bus, no subway. It was very dangerous. And those towers that were very beautiful and very modern … it was surprising to see them in a city struck with deaths and urban decay.”
Laffont is now retired—“I am glad I don’t have to cover those painful events,” he says of the Israel-Gaza conflict—and still lives in New York. He laments that it has changed, and is bothered by the lack of new infrastructure, the traffic, and the dirty streets. But, he admits, “during the night, 42nd Street was a really awful, awful place. Now it belongs to Disney and Sony. Some of these things fill me with happiness.” As his wife, the curator Eliane Laffont, says, “Jean-Pierre has always looked on New York with a critical but affectionate eye.”
On November 13, Laffont will be presented with the Legion of Honor, France’s most prestigious award. “I am extremely proud, of course, but I am not a man of honor,” he says. “I actually prefer other people’s pictures over mine.” —Elena Clavarino
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at AIR MAIL