Photos of Michel Lipchitz

PERPIGNAN, France (AP) — Michel Lipchitz, the kid from Paris backstreets who dreamed of picturing the world's great moments, was lionized this week by peers from just about everywhere who take their photos seriously.

At 65, retiring soon from The Associated Press after 38 years, Lipchitz was featured at the 13th annual festival in Perpignan on the French coast near Spain, as hallowed to news photographers as Cannes is to actors.

"Often news agency people do their daily work unheralded, their pictures known to everyone but not their names," said Jean-Francois Leroy, who directs the annual Visa Pour l'Image gathering. "Lip deserves better."

Mostly, photographers praised his unflaggable passion after all these years, no matter how small the assignment.

"I feel like I just started this profession yesterday, and now I have to go," Lipchitz told an audience here. "But somehow," he added, "I don't think you've seen the last of me."

This week's Paris Match carried four pages recalling his work, including a 1962 cover photo the magazine used during the Algerian War. A fresh-faced Foreign Legion officer stares down a crowd moments before a shoot-out.

In Lipchitz' Perpignan retrospective, Golda Meir and Anwar Sadat laugh together in Jerusalem. Yasser Arafat, years later, is wide-eyed and perplexed. An Arab prays to Mecca as black smoke from an oil well fire blots out Kuwait.

In one celebrated picture, a determined Francois Mitterrand seems to be chasing a grim Valery Giscard d'Etaing from the Elysee Palace in 1981 after Socialists won the French presidency.

But someone else took the two-page photo in Match which captured Lipchitz himself during Iran's 1979 revolution. From a somber sea of black scarves and averted eyes, he beams upward, arms outstretched, the man in his own moment.

To friends and colleagues, the nickname "Lip" is more a description than an abbreviation. "In the most difficult situation, he applies his charm and brings in the picture," said Guy Kopelowicz, Paris photo editor who found Lipchitz already a fixture when he joined AP in 1964.

When the work is done, he adds, Lip can regale a dinner table for hours on end. Once in Monaco, someone dumped a bucket of water from a second-story window at 2:30 a.m. to silence his cafe-table performance.

With his love of a good meal, Lip is known for putting a steak into stake-out, preferring to take culinary advantage of the long hours photographers often spend waiting for a picture.

But his success comes from doing things the hard way, for days on end when the situation demands. Paris riot police broke his skull in 1962, and he has been wounded or injured six times since.

During the 1967 war, Israeli planes strafed the convoy he was in. Like everyone else, he hit the dirt, face down, with hands over his head.

"But then I started thinking," Lipchitz said. "I'm no bigger a target on my back than on my stomach, and at least that way I can take pictures." He did, sending back dramatic photos of diving aircraft.

In Perpignan, Lipchitz passed around the ancient 4-by-5 Speed Graphic camera he first used, and he described himself as a traditionalist slow to adapt to new-fangled gear. In fact, he was quick to master it all.

Nearly four decades ago, when Albert Schweitzer died at Lambarene in Gabon, he flew to the jungle hospital from Libreville, the capital, in a canvas-winged biplane. The befuddled pilot had to follow endless river loops to find it.

No flights were scheduled for days, but he located another willing charter pilot. Four hours after the burial, back in Libreville, he found a way to transmit pictures by radio, two days ahead of his competition.

Schweitzer's daughter reached Gabon the following day from Europe. "But there were pictures of the funeral in this morning's papers in Paris," she told reporters. "How is such a thing possible?"

These days, Lipchitz can still process film in a hotel bathroom but instead uses electronic cameras that can store 100 frames on a chip and relay pictures around the world moments after they're taken.

Constant motion in countless places has been hard on his personal life, Lipchitz allows. But he remains friends with his former wife and close to his son and daughter. "Home is important," he said, adding: "From time to time."

Much of Lip's success, colleagues say, is because he cares so much about his work.

"It can be the most routine handshake, but he treats it as if it was the most important picture of the year," said Jerome Delay, an AP photographer and editor in Paris. "To have that kind of passion for so long, that's amazing."

But also, colleagues add, there is the technique and the thought behind each picture.

"He is a killer with a long lens," Delay said. "He can be on a platform with 100 other guys, and he'll pick a position that makes you wonder if he's crazy. But he is the old wolf. His photo will be one everyone remembers."

When George Bush met Mikhail Gorbachev off Malta in 1989, Lipchitz sat at a cafe table a half mile from other photographers. As Bush suddenly changed ships in heavy seas, he nonchalently snapped away. His were the only pictures.

For all his bon vivant cool and constant joking, Lipchitz never stops thinking about the work at hand.

"A newsphoto should be beautiful in its way," he told his Perpignan audience, "but it is no post card. It should have an immediate impact but also show something else you don't see right away. That is the challenge." (Sept. 7, 2001)

Note: Michel Lipchitz retired September 30, 2001.