"Paris 1968 was a major event for my generation, so it was something I felt I had to document. I was 25 at the time and close to the student movement politically. I wasn't militant but I sympathised with them, especially when I saw how brutal the French police could be. I once saw policemen beat a pregnant woman on the ground.

I wasn't the only photographer recording the revolution. At one point I went with Marc Riboud and Henri Cartier-Bresson to buy helmets to protect our heads from all the stones being thrown. We quickly realised that they made it impossible to use our Leicas properly, so we threw them away. In the beginning we could work quite freely, but then Paris Match magazine published photographs that showed police violence against protesters and this led police to chase photographers and take their cameras. There were cases when photographs of students throwing stones were used by the police to identify and arrest them. So the students also started to be nervous around us. I made sure that any recognisable faces in my photos had black marker over them." Barbey in interview in The Guardian 21 August 2014.