Arizona, 1979

Between 1974 and 1985, French photographer Bernard Plossu was deeply immersed in the American west. A new exhibition, The American Years: Unpublished Images 1966-1985 is at the Galerie du Jour, Paris, France until 28 May 2023. It features recently found prints relating to Plossu’s travels across the Atlantic. All photographs: Bernard Plossu/Courtesy Galerie Camera Obscura & Galerie du Jour agnès b

Arizona, 1981

Bernard Plossu’s American years offer an immersive experience across the west. In these images he plays the tightrope walker between chance and destiny

Okhlaoma, 1980

After the discovery of six boxes containing nearly 860 reels and more than 200 prints not yet inventoried, Plossu has delved into his entire archive from this period

Phoenix, Arizona, 1980

Plossu viewed the immensity and diversity of American life with a European gaze. His photographic practice took on its full scope with his characteristic style of recording encounters and feelings

San Francisco, 1973

The images unfold freely, like road movies without beginning or end, where American reality merges with its own mythology

Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1979

Plossu had travelled to the United States several times before marrying an American and living in New Mexico. In an essay, Lewis Baltz writes: ‘During his time in New Mexico, Plossu learned that American photography was not just an iconographic index of exotic subjects, brilliant in their banality, but above all a set of attitudes, strategies and pictorial ideologies, both determining America’s understanding of itself and determined by it’

Arizona, 1985

Baltz: ‘This is not to say that Plossu has become an American photographer, an impossible transformation that he does not wish to make. He has never really traded his European humanism for American nihilism, nor abandoned his pathos for American irony. But he has achieved an understanding that allows both points of view to coexist in his perception’

Orange County, California, 1983

‘Plossu’s early American work is in the tradition of his illustrious predecessors. His first contacts with America’s culture – or, from a European perspective, its lack of culture – are a reaction against American life, all of it blatant superficiality’

Los Angeles, California, 1980

‘But it was never like Plossu to be satisfied with superficialities, and he deepened his vision by becoming familiar with his subjects. He soon saw, in the mad solitude of the American west, something deeper than a post-surrealistic juxtaposition of Hopi ritual and television lunch trays’

California, 1974

‘Sartre made two important observations about America. The first was that, unlike Europe, the cities were often younger than their inhabitants. The second was that the streets of the cities run in a straight line towards the horizon – as if towards infinity. These remarks are characteristic of the effect that American space has on a cultured European. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that for a sensibility formed in a world of closed perspectives, rooted in human history, apprehending the empty vastness of the American west is a bit like losing one’s gaze in the abyss’

Albuquerque, 1974

Bernard Plossu writes: ‘In photography, you don’t capture time, you evoke it. It flows like fine sand, eternally. And the changing landscapes do not change anything. You don’t take a photograph, you “see” it, and then you share it with others. I practise photography to be on the same level as the world and what is happening’

Côte Californienne, 1979

Plossu: ‘Arizona, the country of Cochise, the chief of the Chiricahua Apaches, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, California, Western Texas and Western Oklahoma, it is this immense desert which goes up to the sea, up to the Pacific Ocean, hot in the south in the palm trees and close to Mexico, foggy and oriental in the north, reminiscent of Scotland even. It was in the superb region of Big Sur that I arrived by an extraordinary chance, at the age of 21. I would return there all the time’