Bernard Plossu, ROMA 1979-2009, 2019

He always knew that photography is not made to stupidly record the pure present. He knows that his gaze is inhabited, in silence, by images of the past infusing his vision of the present: those of the films that impressed him, in the photographic sense of the term, in his youth of passionate cinephile. Rome is a cinema city. Tourists who visit the great monuments, guide in hand, will never understand the essence. The best way to prepare a trip to Rome is to watch movies by Rossellini, De Sica, Fellini, Pasolini, Moretti. Bernard Plossu’s photos never quotes these films, nor they are copies. They are only inhabited by these mental images going along with him in his Roman walks. In Rome, he finds an atmosphere where he feels at home, where he can live the reality as a cinematographic dream: in the grayness and under the rain, as in De Sica, in the contrast of roads cut in two between shade and sun, as in Rossellini o Pasolini. He knows that nature, in Rome, is also in the earth of the city, he knows that trees wait for him everywhere, and that he can walk along the Tevere’s banks where Pasolini plunged the solar beggar from the Sant’Angelo bridge.

(from the preface by Alain Bergala)