NEW MEXICO REVISITED [SOLD]

NEW MEXICO REVISITED

Photographs by Bernard Plossu

Text by Gilles Mora

Foreword by Edward T. Hall

Published by University of New Mexico Press

Hardback with slipcover, first edition 1982, 95 pages, 17 of which is text, the remaining pages are 92 black-and-white photographs.

Condition: the bottom of one page (55-56) is torn off but the photo on that page is not damaged.

Bernard Plossu is a French photographer who has settled in Santa Fe after almost twenty years of traveling around the world.  Here he shows us his vision of New Mexico, a land he has experienced quite differently from the many distinguished photographers who have preceded him here. Plossu sees New Mexico through a filter of imagery from the African continent, for he has photographed Egypt, the Sudan, their deserts, oases, and people.  He sees it very much as a travel photographer, always on the move, and very much as a European, contrasting his stereotypical expectations of the Wild West and Mexico with the odd reality that is New Mexico. He also, paradoxically, sees New Mexico as home.  His is not a New Mexico of bright light and overwhelming vistas but a country of dirt roads and snow, running dogs, old fences and gnarled trees, children at play.

Plossu’s sensibility is an unlikely combination of Jack Kerouac and Marcel Proust, travel and nostalgia. He is an intuitive artist in the modern tradition of documentary photography. 

There are no cliches here. His subtle images must be treated from the data he provides. It is our own Southwest but seen in a new light from another point of view.  We can learn and enjoy from the images, the photographer, and what they release in us. We also learn that our teacher—and all good photographers teach—is far from conventional. There is not a little of the rebel there.  He stirs us up and helps us to look at things in new ways. Edward T. Hall