On the occasion of the publication of Photo Poche 178 dedicated to Bernard Plossu, his gallery Camera Obscura is presenting an exhibition and Didier Brousse, its director, sent us this text:
This exhibition is a subjective journey through a major work that spans around sixty years.
Le voyage Mexicain, published in 1979, caused a new wave in the French photographic landscape. A style was born that inspired an entire generation.
With the necessarily very limited choice that we present, it is a question of showing, precisely, what makes this singular and remarkably constant style of Bernard Plossu since its beginnings: a free and experimental photography, open to an immediate perception of the life, intuitive and spontaneous, but also underpinned by a formalism that Plossu likes to describe as cubist.
Photographer of travel, walking, photographic chance, the unexpected and the glimpsed, Plossu is in fact a formalist photographer, sensitive to the beauty and balance of masses and lines, which he tamed like an acrobat, on the dynamic thread of a gaze always on the hunt.
The refusal of effect is another essential characteristic of his work. Plossu talks about understatement: the art of not doing too much, subtlety.
Banning perspective effects, he strictly limits himself to 50 mm, close to the natural vision of the eye. And, when he photographs in color, he is faithful to the Fresson print whose muted colors, contrast and grain match his black and white work and his principle of the anti-spectacular image.
Didier Brousse
Bernard Plossu : Rétrospective
Until July 27, 2024
Galerie Camera Obscura
268 boulevard Raspail
75014 Paris
www.galeriecameraobscura.fr
