Roger ThΘrond, who died on June 23rd aged 76, was the driving force behind Paris-Match magazine and the most powerful influence on modern French photo-journalism.
For his ability to scan hundreds of photographs in minutes to choose his cover, he earned the nickname "the eye". The great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson said of him, "Roger has the eye". Daniel Filipacchi, his closest friend with whom he relaunched Match in 1976, referred to his "unbeatable eye".
Born in the Mediterranean town of Sete, he received a degree in literature at the University of Montpellier before "going up" to Paris as a cinema critic for L'╔cran franτais in 1945. He joined Paris-Match in 1949, the year it was created as a sort of French version of the US picture magazine LIFE. In 1950, aged 26, he became Match's editor-in-chief, and in 1960 its director.
The years 1962 until 1968 are considered the "golden age" of Paris-Match. In 1964, to cover Pope Paul VI's trip to Jerusalem, he squeezed the magazine's staff into a Caravelle plane, which he used as a photo laboratory and editorial office. The edition was completed before the aircraft landed at Orly.
He fell out with Match's first owner, Jean Pruvost, after the mini-revolution of May 1968 and left with the photographer Filipacchi. In the new atmosphere of sexual freedom, the two friends launched a series of magazines, including Lui and a French version of Playboy, as well as Photo and the events guide Pariscope. For five years he was an advisor to L'Express magazine.
When Filipacchi bought Match in 1976, he returned as director.
All French publications were losing readers to television and Match was no exception. Its circulation had dropped from 1.8 million in 1958 to below 400,000. Providentially for Filipacchi and Roger ThΘrond, Mao died in time for their first issue, which sold close to 2 million copies.
He invented Paris-Match's slogan "Le poids des mots, le choc des photos" (the weight of words, the shock of photos), in 1978. He was often held responsible for the sensationalistic - some said trashy - trend in Match thereafter. He devoted nearly FF80 million (£9.6 million) a year to purchasing the most exclusive images in the world, far less to commissioning print articles. The most controversial photographs he ever published, in black and white, of the dismembered body of a Dutch woman murdered by a Japanese student, appeared in Photo, not Match.
In its early years, Paris-Match published serious reportages. When Cartier-Bresson returned from the USSR in the late 1950s, he published 40 pages of text and photos. But by 1996, Cartier-Bresson complained: "Match is no longer in the same business". To which Roger ThΘrond responded it wasn't his fault if news was no longer Indochina or Algeria, but Princess Diana and Mazarine (Franτois Mitterrand's illegitimate daughter).
He could never resist a scoop. The existence of Mazarine was revealed on the cover of Paris-Match, and it was Match that later published the only photograph of Mitterrand on his deathbed, alongside Nadar's image of the dead Victor Hugo and Man Ray's picture of Proust. He preferred to lose a lawsuit rather than reveal who took the Mitterrand photo.
Starting in the 1960s, he bought old photographs, assembling one of the world's finest collections. Until very recently he could be found at the Vanves and Saint-Ouen flea markets before dawn, studying old images. In 1999, he exhibited 250 of them, but hid most of his 3,000 prints - the entire history of photography - in drawers. One of his favourites was Cartier-Bresson's portrait of Jean-Paul Sartre on the Pont des Arts, which Simone de Beauvoir had tacked on the wall of her apartment.
The finest annual photojournalism festival, Visa pour l'image in Perpignan, was founded by him. Two years ago, in the "Perpignan Appeal" against a French draft law that severely limited the freedom to publish photographs, for example of bomb victims, he wrote: "Without these photos, news would become a smooth formality in a world where nothing would happen."
He spent the better part of 50 years with Paris-Match. Before retiring in 1999, he edited a two-volume book of the magazine's best photos.
When someone quoted the French magazine editor Jacques Duquesne's maxim that "a newspaper editor goes to bed with his paper" to him, Roger ThΘrond responded: "Don't bother telling my wife; she knows about the affair!"
He controlled every photo, every article in his magazine, and showed the same enthusiasm for a "stolen" paparazzi photo as a rare 19th century image.
After his retirement, he said getting over 50 years of journalism was like recovering from an addiction. When he was awarded the Getty Images Life Achievement Award two weeks before his death, he sent a message saying that "this eye is not a voyeur's, but that of a predator of visual emotion."
Roger ThΘrond: born 1924; died, June 2001