BERNARD PLOSSU  I was born in 1945, at the time it was called Indochina… Vietnam. My parents were living there. We got back six months later. I returned with my mother – she died one month ago – on a boat called Le Pasteur. It’s a boat that did Saigon, Colombo, Port Said, Marseille. It was full of people leaving Vietnam because the Japanese were preparing a coup de force [an armed takeover] – they wanted to kill everybody. I have a good brother, who was an Australian soldier, and we cannot talk about Japan; they were terrible. And the French... that was different, they loved the Vietnamese and Vietnam.

BP  My father was. And my mother... Her father had created the Papeteries de l’Indochine, a little enterprise that made recycled papers, bamboo… Very beautiful papers! He was of Italian origin, my grandfather, he looked like Vittorio de Sicca! My mother was raised for a while in Napoli and my father went to Indochina very young. It was those times, the beginning of the century! I was born just before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and when we returned to France my father’s work was in Paris. In the beginning we lived for a little while in Villard- ‑de-Lans, in the mountains and in ‘le midi’, the south of France.

BP  I was about four. To explain about photography... My father was an orphan at 13. My family is from Grenoble. Plossu, means pelossu, ‘que se couvre de peluche’, covered by plush. It’s a mountain name. My father was a very good mountaineer and he was the very good friend of a famous mountaineer named Roger Frison-Roche, who wrote many mountain books where my father is mentioned. He did difficult mountains like des Ècrin and la Meije. Dad and Frison-Roche left for the Sahara in 1937. They crossed the Sahara to ski. As a matter of fact, there are quite a number of books that came out with my dad and Frison-Roche’s [sand]ski pictures. But that didn’t really go well… They could slide, but not really, as the sand didn’t crumble. I say that because I was raised in the mountains. All the holidays were in the mountains, never the ocean, always doing the mountain paths with my father – real mountains – and very difficult tracks. I learned the mountain and mountain photos. I grew up with black and white photos of the Sahara dunes, and all that marked me. Perhaps that’s what made me a photographer, I don’t know.

BP  Good question! My father took me to the Sahara... Ghardaia and Ouargla, in 1958. He offered me a Brownie Flash, and I did my first photos at 13 years old. The story of photography comes a lot from my father. The Sahara ski photos and the initiation trip. The photos I did back then are just like the photos I do now, there’s no difference at all. It was that right from the start.

BP  There’s a sense of an initiation trip. You come from Paris, you arrive in the Sahara, everything is different… The smells, the sounds, the people... Later, the calling is for travel photos.

BP  The first photos I did at 13 were developed in a shop. I still have all the prints from that time. Vintage, small prints. The luck I had was that when I was in Paris I was going to the Cinématheque. I had no diploma, I had nothing, I failed everything. Zero, zero, zero… But I loved the Cinématheque. I learned the history of film and of images; my masters were Bergman, Fellini, Pasolini …

BP  Yes, Langlois. At the Trocadéro. There’s a story… Langlois came here, to La Ciotat, in April 1968 to meet Michel Simon, the actor. Simon lived here… And the true course of Mai 68, the idea behind it, was created here by Langlois and Simon. It’s an interesting la Ciotat story…

BP  No, that was later. In 1965, my parents realised that I had stopped taking all the exams. My grandfather that lived in Indochina went to live in Mexico and found a job there. Immediately, my parents sent me to Mexico, and instead of going to college, I did photos of all my friends there. That was the encounter with the Beat Generation that lived in Mexico. I was 20 years old and travelling the roads with the beatniks of that time… Americans, Mexicans, Argentinians, French… Those were the great times of the Mexican trip. On the road… Chiapas, Oaxaca…

BP  I was filming too!

BP  Well, high school happened! I had failed to finish it a few times. The Cinématheque, and also – this really counts! – meeting a very pretty woman, ma petitte amie Michéle… She was very beautiful! I started doing photos and filming her. Avant-garde cinema, real cinema, had made a mark on me, and I began to translate it in my own fashion … Photos! Somebody said it very well – it was Christophe Berthoud – he said Plossu was a ‘photoaste’. In French we say ‘cineaste’ et ‘photographe’, and I was both. But it wasn’t a job. I wasn’t making money with it.

BP  I didn’t choose, I did both. I filmed a lot. In January 1967, I went back to France. I had to do military service, and to not serve in the army I had to find a profession. I was 21 years old, without a diploma and the alarm bells were beginning to ring… I had brought with me my Mexican photographs and I went around showing them everywhere… travel agencies, book publishers, newspapers. Little by little, I became a commercial photographer. I did covers and stories for many magazines like Atlas and Le Nouvelle Anglaterre. I sold boxes with photos to travel agencies. I did book covers. My commercial archives are enormous. They are now in the library of the Centre Pompidou. There is a project, one day, to do a show with my photos – I don’t like the word creative – my personal photos, mixed with the commercial ones, to show my photographic life. I discovered the value of my Voyage Mexicain [Mexican Journey] black and white photos years later with people like Allan Porter of Camera Magazine and Claude Nori of Contrejour¹, who told me these were good photos. But at that time, I was a commercial photographer. I did everything. I loved that job. In Social Security, I wasn’t an artist, I was a photographic author.