From April 9 to May 17, La Fábrica exhibits the work of photographer Bernard Plossu. In his first exhibition at La Fábrica, Plossu presents around 40 photographs among which are 25 new works from American West take in the 1970s and a selection of 12 of his most recognizable images.
Travel photography is the cornerstone of the career of Plossu. Photographer traveler par excellence, his nomadic spirit has led him to travel the world. Through photographs of small and medium formats focus on an intimate and poetic landscape. An approach to the reality that only achieved after long hours of walking and silent putting his sights on the most simple and everyday.
The exhibition includes five unpublished images printed using Fresson coal process to show an unique facet of the work of Plossu, his work in color, whose importance is that since 1975, Plossu not work with color, but uses the black and white with a 50mm lens.
About the author
The work of French photographer Bernard Plossu (1945 Dalat, Vietnam) is a broad response of his traveling vocation. With six years back with his family to Paris and in 1958 performed a spiritual journey to the Sahara with a Brownie camera flash that his father gives him his father. During his youth attends regularly to the Cinematheque in Paris. What he sees there influences him intensively, declaring that his photograph "is the daughter of the Nouvelle Vague cinema that was during the 50s and 60s of last century. A film that was a way of walking with a camera to the back and not knowing where the magic was. Because a picture is a picture and no trick. " In 1965 he traveled to Mexico and since then, has photographed a number of countries, with special attention to North Africa, the African deserts and American and Mediterranean Europe. Since 1975, the date of his first trip to Niger, begins to work in black and white, constantly seeking the exact tonal scale.
His work has earned him, in 1988, the National Prize of Photography in France. In that year the Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre George Pompidou organized a great retrospective of his work. In 1993 the Gulbenkian Foundation presented his photograph in Lisbon. In 1996 held the exhibition The Almeria years with toy cameras in the Canal de Isabel II of Madrid Region and in 1997 the IVAM organizes his bigger retrospective in Spain. Plossu participated in PHotoEspaña 2001 with the screening of L’Europe du Sud Contemporaine and in 2013 he was awarded the PhotoEspaña Prize.
Plossu Bernard’s work is collected in a large collection of books among them Le Voyage Mexicain 1965-1966, Contrejour (1979 and 1990); The African Desert, The University of Arizona Press (1987); Les paysages intermediaries, Contrejour and Centre Georges Pompidou(1988); Françoise, Mestizo (1996); O país da poesía, Centro Portugues de Fotografia (1999); L’Europe du Sud Contemporaine, Images en Manoeuvres Éditions (2002); and Europa, La Fábrica and Santander Foundation 2016 (2011).
