Until 24 October 2015, Camera Obscura gallery will be showing Bernard Plossu’s Couleur exhibition, revealing a lesser-known side to his work — his colour photography.
In fact, Plossu started working in colour right from the start. In 1967, his discovery of the Fresson process and the friendship he forged with this family of printers, exclusive owners of the eponymous pigmentary process, marked the start of a virtually exclusive collaboration: the greatest share of Plossu’s colour work is developed using “Fresson charcoal”.
This very special rendering was an ideal medium via which to express his sensitivity and he “envisioned” colour photography through this “atmospheric” filter and its faded, indistinct shades.
As he likes to say himself, one word could be used to sum up his approach to images – “understatement”, in other words not overdoing it and avoiding a beautifully dressed image or the spectacular. Fresson prints apply this same philosophy: “They are grainy, they are matte, like black and white photos. There is nothing pictorial about my approach – on the contrary, I often say that the worst thing you can say about a photo is ‘it looks like a painting’.
The grain gives a similar atmosphere to Tri-X film. There is something ‘anti-spectacular’ about the matte rendering that I like. The Fresson process subtly attenuates harsh, excessive light, whether the scene was captured in Arizona or the South of France!”
Whether in black or white or in colour, Plossu’s eye and his style remain the same, but the colour clearly adds a special formal kind of elation, a new dimension.
Not that this dimension comes as “something extra” – instead substituting one abstraction for another: Fresson colour in place of black and white. Plossu’s vision is expressed via two different techniques, in the same way a poet might switch from free verse to rhyme. There are even some images (from “Voyage Mexicain” in particular) where the negative was originally developed in black and white before being converted to colour with the Fresson process.
We often look for the “existential” aspect – the memory or the narrative – in Plossu’s photography before anything else, whereas the artist himself claims to take a formalist approach. This search for formality is clear in the Fresson prints where we marvel at the subtle, unconventional arrangement of the masses, lines and colours.
However, as we savour the freshness of this intuitive, rapid, airy photography, we can’t help but think that Plossu is one of the rare photographers who has succeeded in capturing that fleeting feeling of our presence in the world that sometimes flares up inside us. Photography capturing one tiny moment in everyday reality and freezing it as evidence… the mystery of Plossu.
EXHIBITION
Couleur by Bernard Plossu
From October 24th, 2015
Galerie Camera Obscura
268, boulevard Raspail
75014 Paris
France
Tuesday – Friday: 12h – 19h / samedi 11 – 19h
