Bernard Plossu French, b. 1945

Bernard Plossu, born in 1945 in Dalat, Vietnam, is a photographer and traveler whose work is a personal exploration of the world, far from the beaten paths. At a very young age, he discovered photography during a trip to the Sahara with his father, and by his teenage years, he was taking his first pictures with a Brownie Flash camera. At the age of 20, he moved to Mexico, where he settled and discovered the country's mixed cultures, especially in his early series that would later inspire his book Le Voyage mexicain (1979). In 1967, after a stay in California where he met American countercultural figures like Henry Miller and Allen Ginsberg, Plossu began to professionalize in France. He collaborated with travel agencies and made reports on tourist destinations. However, he quickly distanced himself from commercial expectations and shifted to a more intimate and personal style of photography.

India, which he photographed in 1970, marked a turning point in his work. Abandoning the use of wide-angle lenses, he focused on a more direct approach with a 50mm lens and a pure black-and-white style. This minimalist and observational approach reached its peak in his series on Niger and Morocco. After several years spent in the United States, where he continued to enrich his photographic work with a subtle and poetic vision of the world, he returned to France in 1985. His work has been presented in numerous international exhibitions, and Bernard Plossu has established himself as one of the leading photographers of the contemporary scene, true to his quest for truth and simple emotion through the lens.