Fotografia europea
Reggio Emilia 2007

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27 aprile
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Biography

BERNARD PLOSSU

Bernard Plossu (Dalat, Vietnam, 1945) started photographing at the age of 13 during a trip to the Sahara desert with his father. He studied philosophy at the University of Paris and completed his studies at the American University of Mexico City. In 1966 he took part in the expedition of a group of English ethnologists into the Chiapas (Mexico) jungle in 1966, and shot a series of photographs that have become legendary. They are collected in a book entitled Le voyage mexicain (Contrejour, Paris, 1979). The images of those places are gathered by eyes in perpetual movment: from the buses, trains and old jeeps. The use of the “blurred” image is still a technique that distinguishes all of Plossu’s work. The most substantial corpus of his work is made up of travel reporting. A globetrotter by natural disposition, within a few years’ time he travelled through India, the French Alps, Senegal, Egypt, New Mexico, Italy and Nigeria, where he met and depicted the nomadic tribe of the Peul Bororo. In 1988 he was celebrated by a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou of Paris, and won the Grand Prix de la Photographie in France. His photographs have been exhibited at the world’s greatest museums and are in all public and private collections.