If Bernard Plossu’s work is perhaps seen as that of a “travel photographer”, we search in vain for some trace of exoticism, the desire to make the place awesome. Against the grain of all aesthetic theory, Bernard Plossu has taken photographs for more than half a century with an urgency that is evidence of his love for life, his passion to see everything, to go through everything, capable of extracting from a town or a neighbourhood what makes it tick.
From Europe to the United States, to Africa, Bernard Plossu invites to a nervous approach, a lyricism of the moment, alternating with more composed photographs that are so much like pauses. Without a subject hierarchy, favouring a cheap camera with a 50mm lens, similar to a human eye, his photographs are more than just “travel logbooks”: stealthily imposing themselves on him, they are telegrams of the transcendent everyday, moment more poetic than decisive.
Xavier Canonne
Bernard Plossu, Les feux du bivouac
Until 11th February 2017
Hôtel Fonfreyde
34 Rue des Gras
63000 Clermont-Ferrand
France
http://www.clermont-ferrand.fr/-Hotel-Fontfreyde-Centre-Photographique-.html
