Bernard Plossu

FRANCE • BORN IN 1945

FRESSON COLOURS

Bernard Plossu likes to call himself “half-traveller and half-migratory photographer”, but he really needs no introduction. For years, he has been roaming the world, capturing furtive moments in Mexico’s Chiapas, the American West, the Niger desert, the villages of Morocco and on the coast of Brittany. He became famous for his black-and-whites, imbued with iridescent grey. Too often compared to Robert Frank or Édouard Boubat, both of whom he admires, his style is singular and deeply sensitive. His eyes are as sharp as his memory.

When we arrived at his home in La Ciotat, he chuckled about the sedentary lifestyle that has him tied to this building, because his lifelong pursuit of the meaning of life always revolved around travel. With his youthful good looks and tender smile, he took us on a tour of this house of memories where, from floor to ceiling, there are piles of jumbled boxes of negatives, prints of all kinds, old books, drawings donated by his painter friends and objects unearthed over sixty years of wanderlust. “It’s an organised mess,” he explains, “I’m the only one who can locate my little ones.” He wanted to show us a photograph taken in Mexico in 1965. “It’s like a painting!” we exclaimed. An unfortunate compliment. That’s the very thing he dislikes hearing, even though he admits to an affinity with Corot for his lighting, Courbet for his landscapes, Malevitch for his geometric forms and Hopper for his abstract forms.

Right from his earliest photographs, Bernard Plossu invented a visual grammar that combines subjectivity, simplicity, a sensorial dimension and rigorous composition. Here, it is his lesser-known colour photographs that we wanted to showcase with these Fresson prints. The Fresson pigment process was invented in the 19th century by the family of the same name in Savigny-sur-Orge, south of Paris. The special texture and subtle rendering it gives is the perfect match for the no-frills approach adopted by the photographer, who seeks to distance himself from the spectacular and the grandiloquent. What emerges are images of poetry, the kind that sets the world, and its many forms, aflutter. With a powdery, slightly charcoaly finish that gives landscapes an unreal look.

RUE SAINT-VINCENT
 

Exhibition organised in partnership with the Camera Obscura gallery, Paris.

Thanks to Didier Brousse and César Champetier.