Roma 1979-2009

Bernard Plossu
(Dalat, Vietnam, 1945) He began taking photographs at the age of thirteen during a trip with his father in the Sahara desert. He studies philosophy at the University of Paris and finishes his studies at the American University of Mexico City. In 1966 he participated as a photoreporter in the expedition of a group of English ethnologists in the jungle of Chiapas (Mexico) and made a series of photographs that became legendary and grouped in a book entitled Le voyage mexicain (Contrejour, Paris, 1979). The images of those places are collected by eyes in constant motion: from buses, trains, old vans. The use of "blur" remains a technique that will characterize the Plossu's entire work. The most substantial corpus of his work consists of travel reportage; globe-trotter by nature in a few years he travelled through India, the French Alps, Senegal, Egypt, New Mexico, Italy and Nigeria, where he meet and portrayed the nomadic Peul Bororo tribe. In 1988 he was celebrated by a retrospective at the Center Pompidou in Paris and won the Grand Prix de la Photographie in France. His photographs have been exhibited in the largest museums in the world and are present in all public and private collections.