PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW : Light, Romance Dominate Plossu’s Pictures

It’s no wonder that a certain romance dominates the work of photographer Bernard Plossu.

Born in Vietnam in 1945, Plossu grew up in Paris. He took his first photograph as a teen-ager while on a family trip in the African desert. At the age of 20, he left Paris to live with relatives in Mexico. He spent 10 years traveling the globe, taking pictures (currently on exhibit at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park) throughout Europe, Africa, North and Central America and India, then settled in New Mexico for a few years, returning to Paris in 1985.

Doesn’t that sound like a romantic life?

Plossu’s exhibit at MOPA, the first major American museum survey of his work, is titled “Desert Wind/Paris Rain,” and the 110 photographs reflect his affinity for both urban and less-populated landscapes.

Plossu is definitely from the low-tech school of photography. He uses only a 35-millimeter camera with a 55-millimeter lens “because its normal vision allows me to be more self-effacing, and in doing so, to avoid exercises in style,” he has said. In a statement accompanying the exhibit he says, “The only style is no style at all.”

Still, there seems to be a distinct style in much of Plossu’s black-and-white work. Many of the photos are blurry and grainy, evoking another time. Even the most recent photos from 1988 have a vintage quality about them. And in many of the photos, particularly the shots from European locales (as in “Greece, 1989”), Plossu uses the occasional human figure as a silhouette, resulting in haunting, romantic images.

Like other photographers who work in this naturalistic style, Plossu is not a master of light--he is its slave. Plossu recognizes the nature of the relationship and uses his eye to capture his master’s gifts.

Some of the best examples include a 1971 image from inside a Paris bus as a woman leans back in her seat and is bathed by a ray of light. In a 1975 shot taken in Agades, Niger, a man on a horse rides away from the camera and the sun at his back throws an eerie shadow onto a nearby wall.

Perhaps the most striking black-and-white image was also taken in Agades.

Some sort of tribal ceremony is going on as a circle of men surround the participants. On the left, two men seem to be wrestling. On the right, a man plays a drum. In the middle, a figure is in a seated position, though no chair is discernable. The middle figure is shrouded by light and dust, creating a mysterious and other-wordly image.

Plossu admits to cinematic influences, and they are exemplified by three photos, including a shot in a Paris cafe where a woman reaches across a table to caress another woman’s head; in a 1966 shot from Mexico City where a woman’s stockinged leg stretches across the top of the frame while a man in sunglasses smiles at the bottom; and another--quite incongruous--shot from Mexico, which looks like a still from a bad movie. In this photo, a European-looking couple sits in what seems to be a very small vehicle. They are dressed fashionably--her hair in a scarf, a hat sitting jauntily on his head. Perched behind them are an obviously Mexican newlywed couple. She’s in her wedding gown, smiling at the man behind the wheel. Next to her is her mate, wearing a cheap-looking black leather jacket and an uncertain look on his face.

This last photo, though intriguing, also exemplifies the exhibit’s weaknesses. The shots that are clearly focused, like the jets flying over Aztec ruins in Mexico or a shot of the Spanish shoreline, seem uncharacteristic and out of place next to the preponderance of darker, moodier work. And there is little exceptional in the 10 photos of Plossu’s wife and children, save for the shot titled “Francoise and Joaquim on Stromboli Island.”

In this image, the photographer’s wife and son stand facing the camera. Behind them is a large mountain jutting out of a body of water. But this is no portrait of the family on vacation. Characteristically, Plossu chooses to set his focus on the landscape in the background. In the foreground are the wife and child, blurred beyond recognition to anyone but their immediate family.

Plossu’s color images are as striking as his best black-and-white work--albeit for different reasons. The images are developed utilizing a process created by turn-of-the-century inventor Theodore Henri Fresson. Certain details of the Fresson method are to this day an unpatented family secret and only a small number of images are produced annually by the family lab.

The complicated process involves the use of carbon or pigment, instead of silver, on the photographic paper, producing richly textured images with highly saturated colors that have the quality of hand-tinted photographs. But it’s all in the processing and the result is what is widely considered the most stable color photographs in existence, with a life span of almost 100 years before noticeable color shifts occur.

The process is especially flattering to Plossu’s desert images, heightening the colors of nature with a hyper-real vibrancy.

“Desert Wind/Paris Rain: Photographs of Bernard Plossu,” on exhibit through May 13. MOPA is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursdays until 9 p.m. On Saturday at 3:30 p.m. at the Reuben H. Fleet Space Theatre, photographer, writer and curator William Messer will deliver a slide lecture on contemporary French photography. For more information, call MOPA, 239-5262.