When Bernard Plossu arrived in Mexico in 1965 at the age of 20, he had received no photographic training. He had heard of neither Robert Frank nor Henri Cartier-Bresson, and his only visual culture came from comic strips and popular press magazines such as Paris Match and Jours de France. Little did he know that he was about to embark on a journey that would not only change his life, but also inspire a photographic manifesto that would leave an indelible mark on the history of photography.

As a teenager, Bernard Plossu was rocked by Miles Davis and Elvis Presley, and often skipped school to spend afternoons at the Cinémathèque de Paris, where he discovered the films of Mizoguchi, Dreyer, Buñuel, Bergman and Truffaut; it was there that he took his first photos of his girlfriend Michèle, “even more beautiful than the actresses on the screen”. When he failed his baccalauréat, he decided to leave the comfort of his bourgeois family and move to Mexico to live with his maternal grandparents, who had emigrated from Indochina. There, he began studying philosophy, which he abandoned a few weeks later to embrace the bohemian life: he befriended local beatniks and backpackers, smoked pot and sympathized with the opposition to the Vietnam War. Bill Coleman, an activist and member of the Students for a Democratic Society, became his mentor and guide after the two young men meet at university. In the zeitgeist between the end of beat culture and the rise of the hippie movement, the duo hit the road and embarked on a nomadic life, traveling by foot, hitchhiking and bus.

At the wheel of a beat-up old Pontiac with Coleman, or in Crazy George’s Volkswagen convertible, they slept from beach to beach, making new friends along the way – Laurie, Karina, Juan the Puerto Rican poet, Roger and his (still stoned) ukulele. They traveled from San Miguel de Allende to San Cristóbal de Las Casas, via Guanajuato and Oaxaca, and celebrated New Year’s Eve on Zipolite beach in Puerto Ángel. Equipped with a Kodak Retina, Bernard Plossu criss-crossed Mexico for almost a year and a half. He photographed intuitively, capturing fleeting moments of grace, “just like that, without any particular reason, to live the experience, the present moment”.

It was during this voyage of initiation that he discovered his future major themes: friends, the road, wandering, sensuality, freedom, “that connivance, that ideal familiarity” he was able to establish with the people he met and the places he passed through. He found poetry in the most ordinary situations, which he captured on the fly without concern for framing, focus or light: his traveling companions dozing in the back of a car, a woman in her wedding dress, his girlfriend’s knees caught under a skirt as she crouches, arms flailing in a car window… From the start, he was passionately in love with Mexico, which gave him the impression of experiencing On the road without reading Kerouac. Along the way, he joined an ethnographic expedition and spent three months photographing the wild jungles of Chiapas, near the Guatemalan border.

Bernard Plossu’s visual chronicles reflect a rare photographic freedom, an almost childlike sense of wonder at a place where anything seems possible. Ten years later, he published a small travel diary of some sixty images, Le voyage mexicain (The Mexican Journeyà, which became a bible for a whole generation of photographers. “A lot of young people tell me they’ve traveled with this book in their pocket, considering it a reference,” he says, “but it’s not an art book about Mexico; rather, it’s a book about being twenty and going anywhere, doing anything.”

The book devoted to Bernard Plossu published by Actes Sud is available for purchase the book for €14.50. Click here.

The “Bernard Plossu, Rétrospective” exhibition can be seen at the Camera Obscura gallery, Paris, from June 7 to July 27, 2024.

Another exhibition, « Bernard Plossu, Fresson », is also on view at the festival in La Gacilly, France, from June 21 to November 2024.

“A picture is worth a thousand words.” This is certainly true of the images in “Myths, Secrets, Lies, and Truths: Photography from the Doug McCraw Collection,” on view at the Boca Raton Museum of Art June 12 to October 13. The exhibition highlights photographic works by Hank Willis Thomas, Spider Martin, Sheila Pree Bright, Liesa Cole, and Karen Graffeo that emphasize the complexity of the human condition.

From behind their lenses, these five photographers have captured snapshots that reveal the murky myths, personal truths, deliberate lies, and kept secrets that influence our perceptions of the other and the human experience overall. Also debuting June 12 is “Julie Evans: Eating Sunshine,” a solo exhibit of the New York–based artist’s new ceramic sculptures alongside her works on paper.

In 2011, a new art star burst onto the scene. A nanny and a self-taught photographer, Vivian Maier had roamed the streets of New York City and Chicago in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, her pint-sized charges in tow, snapping pictures of derelicts and swells, skyscrapers and train yards, naked mannequins and discarded dolls.

She had taken hundreds of thousands of these photos. She stashed them in a storage unit until she couldn’t afford the payments any longer. She died destitute in 2009, at the age of 83. But then a young real estate developer named John Maloof bought the contents of her locker at a Chicago auction, scanned what he found, and uploaded it to Flickr.

Breathless accolades, gallery shows, a copyright dispute, and even an Oscar-nominated documentary followed.

Photo enthusiasts responded to her funny pictures of rich ladies wearing luxe furs and mean scowls, her candid images of bums and bankers sleeping on park benches, her empathetic yet unsentimental portrayals of children, her enigmatic self-portraits. 

Moreso, they marveled at her remarkable story.

Vivian Maier, Self-Portrait, New York, NY, 1954. © Estate of Vivian Maier / Courtesy Maloof Collection / Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY.

Now, Fotografiska in New York City has opened the first major museum retrospective in the United States dedicated to this mysterious artist, who was—it turns out—more than a street photographer.

“Vivian Maier: Unseen Work” (through Sept. 29), which debuted at Paris’ Musée du Luxembourg in 2021, features approximately 230 items, including vintage and modern prints, black-and-white and color photographs, Super 8 footage, contact sheets, and audio recordings.

“My aim was to give a complete overview of the work,” said the show’s curator, Anne Morin of Madrid-based cultural management company diChroma Photography. In addition to her beloved street pictures, there are abstract experiments with light and shadow (often done in collaboration with the children she cared for), extreme close-ups of wrinkled hands and newspaper headlines, and complicated self-portraits using a variety of mirrors and reflections.

Vivian Maier, Chicago, IL (1957). © Estate of Vivian Maier / Courtesy Maloof Collection / Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY

When she first embarked on the project 15 years ago, she explained, “We had a goal, which was to set her name in the history of photography near the main monsters: Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson. And no question: she’s seated and well-settled.”

Born in the Bronx in 1926, Maier spent much of her childhood between New York City and France. She got her first Brownie camera as a kid. In 1951 she was hired as a governess in New York, and in 1956 she moved to Chicago and continued to nanny for several families for the next few decades. Her job allowed her time and money to pursue her passion for taking pictures, which she often did while on the clock. 

Vivian Maier, Grenoble, France (1959). © Estate of Vivian Maier / Courtesy Maloof Collection / Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY.

Her street photos have a certain frankness. Probably because she was poor herself, she portrayed the poor and vulnerable without sentimentality: a toothless elderly woman, smiling warmly at the camera, or an older, bespectacled man struggling to read the paper. She often showed contempt for the rich: a garishly dressed woman with too much makeup yelling at a driver, a suited businessman caught mid-yawn. 

She sometimes displayed a prurient, or maybe puritan, streak. For example, she filmed the outside of an adult cinema with her Super 8 camera, documenting the men sheepishly, skittishly contemplating buying a ticket before going inside. 

Vivian Maier, Central Park (1959). © Estate of Vivian Maier / Courtesy Maloof Collection / Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY.

Yet, she seemed to appreciate beauty, too: a young brunette with cat-eye makeup holding a fluffy black cat; Lena Horne, radiant in pearls; all manner of couples holding hands.

“Vivian Maier had the faculty and capacity to just take the extraordinary in the banality of daily life,” Morin said, citing a Victor Hugo quote: “The extraordinary is in the deep of the ordinary.”

“I think she was collecting the world in which she was living,” she continued. “She was doing a kind of portrait of her time. She was a pack rat: she was collecting little moments that completely escaped [most people’s vision].”

Vivian Maier, Untitled (1958). ©Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY.

And yet, what struck me most about this exhibition is not Maier’s skill as a documentarian, but rather the guileless experimentation and enthusiasm that characterizes so much outsider art. Howard Greenberg, whose gallery represents Maier’s work in New York, agreed. “Vivian Maier is one of the great outsider artists,” he told me.

Like other self-taught artists, such as Henry Darger or Judith Scott, Maier was always, compulsively, creating. Her early self-portraits using mirrors, reflections, and shadows were experiments in lighting and special effects. Later, when she moved to Chicago, she urged the children she nannied to pose behind sheets, to blow bubbles, or to hide in concrete tubes so she could try to show their shadows, their kinetic motion, their gleeful energy. These photos don’t all work, but they capture, more than a moment, the very magical, radical act of photographing itself: the joy of holding a camera up and going “click.”

Maier stopped taking pictures entirely sometime in the 1990s. She had switched to color photography and her images got more abstract as time went on. She was unhoused for a while. At some point in the 2000s, three of the boys she had taken care of in Chicago moved her into a nice apartment and checked in on her until her death. 

Vivian Maier, Chicago area, IL, 1961. ©Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY.

What would Maier make of her discovery? Her fame? “I don’t think she would be happy,” said Greenberg. “She may have wanted or liked the attention when she was younger, but not by the end.”

Maier certainly didn’t seem to seek the spotlight. She rarely printed her work. She barely looked at the hundreds of thousands of pictures she took. After a certain point, she didn’t even bother developing her film.

Perhaps she couldn’t afford it. Perhaps it was too much of a hassle. Perhaps it wasn’t even the pictures that were that important to her, but the act of taking them: the way it encouraged a new way of seeing, of looking, and of being in a world—as a woman and as an outsider.

“Vivian Maier: Unseen Work” is on view at Fotografiska New York, 281 Park Avenue South, through Sept. 29.

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Fine-art photography is something more than regular photo-effort, and is a genre that is highly developed in this country. In the last 100 years Sakartvelo has given the world tens of names in the field that have gone down in the history with the mark of their genuine professionalism, and Yuri Mechitov is one of them, whose black-and-white portraits were recently on display at the exhibition hall of the Georgian Academy of Arts, a magical show of old and new works preserved in his vast portfolio. Literally each portrait of that impressive indoor vernissage is marked with the photographer’s individual aesthetic quality and imaginative faculty, each piece going beyond plain camera mastery to perpetuate the captured image in the mind of the spectator with incisive sharpness. Mechitov talks to us through those images, as if he is rewriting human history in painfully memorable facial expressions to forever leave an indelible impression in the minds of those who found time to go to the event.

Yuri will be 75 next year. Oddly enough, he was trained as a mining engineer, but photo-art is what has infatuated his inquisitive personality beyond the imagination of anybody around him, including his family members. Little Yuri started shooting when he was hardly eight. He began exhibiting his photo-material as early as 1979, and today boasts having almost 100 authorized exhibitions under his belt. Mechitov’s artistic biography accounts for several documentaries and roles in some feature films. He was lucky enough to have worked with Sergei Parajanov, an outstanding film director of soviet times. He has written books and lectured for university students, and even functioned as Deputy Minister of Culture of Georgia, but I am not surprised – after all, the great Goethe himself used to be a finance minister!

The latest exhibition we are talking about was opened in the presence of a huge crowd. The curiosity of further attendants lasted for about a fortnight, which is quite an indicator in today’s busy world. Among the photo-exhibits, there were many famous faces, thus building the amazingly vivid photo-annals of Sakartvelo. Some of the personalities reflected in Mechitov’s works are no longer among us, but the author has perpetuated their memorable images as if writing them in stone. Writes Maia Deisadze, who has specialized in interpreting, evaluating and promoting Mechitov’s prolific legacy: “Outstanding photo-artist, peerless portraitist, and not just that . . . my closest friend and guru; his art is versatile; he is our nation’s genuine chronicler; his love for fellow-humans knows no limits, and this is clearly felt in all his masterpieces.”

But nobody can be more precise than Mechitov himself in describing his creative sense: “I have tried a variety of photographic genres, and was not unsuccessful. And yet, the genre closest to me is portraiture. This is an image of a man/woman who, alone in the entire animal world, knows for sure that he/she is mortal. This knowledge is especially evident when photographing very old or terminally ill people who are already aware of their imminent end. They think, not without reason, that this may be their last photographic image.”

Yuri Mechitov is always in the public eye, and the public in his eye, never missing a chance to freeze in time and digitalize the most attractive and shocking moments of our lives, especially the faces of our compatriots, this, in most cases, happening accidentally; the creative grandmaster’s spontaneity always clear, present and poised. Incidentally, judging by his childlike nature, when I see him at work, I can’t help throwing my imagination back into his childhood, thinking that he is still there, only with a somewhat honed sense of picture and seriously matured possession of the camera’s technical eye. On top of all that, Yuri Mechitov is a well-known public figure who the people never desist to talk about because he is always deeply in the swim of the most important matters of society. Aren’t we all lucky to have around a man who can do both – comment on current events and reflect the self-same proceedings in his artistic photo escapades? What an enduring service to the country!

By Nugzar B. Ruhadze