Gilles Caron was born in 1939 in Neuilly near Paris, France. After spending three years as a paratrooper in Algeria fighting a war he opposed, in 1967 he co-founded the Gamma photo agency. Dubbed the French "Robert Capa," he proceeded to cover the Six-Day War in Israel, conflict in Vietnam and Biafra (Nigeria), the May 1968 student upheavel in Paris, riots in Northern Ireland, anti-Soviet demonstrations in Prague, and the Toubou uprising against the central government in Chad in 1970. On April 4 of that same year his meteoric career was cut short when he went missing in a Khmer Rouge-controlled area of Cambodia.