Bernard Plossu, le voyage au Sahel, 1975-1976

La Boîte Arts Graphiques presents “Bernard Plossu, the Journey to the Sahel, 1975–1976” at the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac on January 29, 2026, at 9:30 a.m., a body of photographs produced during an extended journey across the Sahelian belt. This presentation highlights a decisive moment in the photographer’s trajectory, where travel becomes inseparable from a way of being in the world and of photographing.

Bernard Plossu, a prominent figure in French photography, is known for his numerous images made in different parts of the world. The places he photographed are rarely chosen at random, and his practice is closely tied to a specific relationship with territory. Italy, Spain, the United States—where he lived for several years—Mexico, and India are, for many of us, familiar through his vision.

His rejection of formal studies and an attraction to cinema and painting ultimately led him to photography. His activity began in the 1960s with a year-long stay in Mexico, which preceded a Californian decade from 1967 to 1977. But the 1975–1976 journey to the Sahel marks a turning point in his way of working and existing as a photographer. It is already a kind of return to the desert regions of the Sahara. He had first discovered them with his father, Albert Plossu, in 1958—a truly formative first trip for the thirteen-year-old—and had already taken photographs then. Traveling across the Sahel for several months between 1975 and 1976, he decided to use only a 50-millimeter lens, a “no-frills focal length” that keeps him at the proper distance from those he photographs, rejecting any stylistic effect. He adhered to it from that point on.

These Sahel images are therefore significant on several levels, and the photographer’s offer to donate them to the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in 2021 bears witness to his approach. This gift of 156 prints, several of them printed by his wife, the photographer Françoise Nuñez, gathers something essential in Bernard Plossu’s practice. In these glimpsed silhouettes, these calm face-to-face encounters, this attention to textures, to luminous vibrations, to people’s attitudes and micro-gestures, one can discern one of the photographer’s creeds: “grandeur must be shown on a small scale.”