Marie-Laure de Decker was born on 2 August 1947 in
Bône,
French Algeria (now
Annaba, Algeria). When she was twenty years old, she worked as a model. In her work, she met photographer Dominique Merlin and saw the footage that he captured for
The Anderson Platoon, a documentary about the
Vietnam War. Inspired by his work, she learned to develop film and became a photographer. To get her start in the industry, she tracked down artists that she admired, such as
Man Ray and
Marcel Duchamp, and asked to take their photographs. De Decker started working in
war photography when she joined
Newsweek's team in
Saigon to document the
Vietnam War. While in Chad, she interacted extensively with the
Wodaabe people. She enjoyed working with the Wodaabe as they were one of the few groups who were not involved in the military conflict, and she wished to preserve their culture through photography as their population declined. De Decker moved to a home near
Rabastens in the 1990s, where she had spent time as a child when visiting her aunt. She held an exhibition in 2002 for her photography of the city. and then married the lawyer
Thierry Levy, with whom she had a second son. She began working as a photographer for
Gamma in 1971 through 2009. After her work with Gamma, she became involved in a legal dispute to retain the rights to the photographs she took for the agency, which she ultimately lost. She was awarded the Albert Kahn International Planet Prize in 2013 for her war photography. She died in
Toulouse on 15 July 2023, at the age of 75. == Photography ==