Plossu

A remarkable collection of New Mexico images by one of today's best-known French photographers.

The definitive collection of Bernard Plossu’s iconic color photographs of the American Southwest Bernard Plossu has been called “the most American of French photographers” by his friend and colleague Lewis Baltz. Although he is best known for his work in black and white, often capturing a bohemian world of free-spirited adventure, Plossu has also shot in color throughout his career. This book showcases 88 bold and cinematic color photographs, many of which are previously unpublished, dating from the 1970s and early 80s, when Plossu was resident in the US. Strikingly rendered using the Fresson carbon printing process, these images depict an unmistakably American landscape of motels and rodeos, deserts and highways; a realm that is both rugged and dreamlike, haunted by the mythic imagery of the Old West. They combine to form a memorable and atmospheric collection of work by a supremely talented photographer.

Since early in its history, photography has been used by a diversity of travellers, whose collected photographs have been compiled into albums. But Photographic Travel as a genre of art did not appear before the second half of the twentieth century, and had a singular fate and fortune in the US as well as in Europe. The initial objective of some itinerant photographers is to make a book; their shooting practice is conditioned by this objective, as well as their travel experience. Their books – designed as one coherent hole – refer to their wandering experience, even though their stories are never completely free from fiction. In these books, their travels are converged, and their subjectivity is revealed. It is therefore relevant to call such books made of photographies, and possibly words about the travel experience, Photographic Travel books (comparably to Travel books). Danièle Méaux has tackled the task of characterizing this genre.

For more than 15 years, French photographer Bernard Plossu took extended trips to Mexico to photograph people, landscapes and a culture in flux. " Vámanos! Bernard Plossu in México" captures the bohemian adventures of this traveler's four journeys, the first in 1965-66 and the last in 1981. His black-and-white and color images have transfixed generations of young people in France, who cherish him in the way young Americans celebrate Jack Kerouac. Plossu's romantic vision encompasses coquettish women, peasants at work, fog-wrapped trails in the jungle and waves lapping at sandy beaches. Yet Plossu is also aware of poverty and the challenges facing a modernizing society, and his photographs capture the nobility of all his subjects. Containing more than 300 photographs and organized into chapters representing each of his Mexican journeys, this is the first compilation of Plossu's Mexican work.

After the end of World War II, the American road trip began appearing prominently in literature, music, movies, and photography. Many photographers embarked on trips across the U.S. in order to create work, including Robert Frank, whose seminal 1955 road trip resulted in The Americans. However, he was preceded by Edward Weston, who traveled across the country taking pictures to illustrate Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass; Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose 1947 trip through the American South and into the West was published in the early 1950s in Harper's Bazaar; and Ed Ruscha, whose road trips between Los Angeles and Oklahoma later became Twentysix Gasoline Stations. Hundreds of photographers have continued the tradition of the photographic road trip on down to the present, from Stephen Shore to Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs. The Open Road considers the photographic road trip as a genre in and of itself, and presents the story of photographers for whom the American road is muse. The book features David Campany's introduction to the genre and eighteen chapters presented chronologically, each exploring one American road trip in depth through a portfolio of images and informative texts, highlighting some of the most important bodies of work made on the road from The Americans to present day.

Silicon technology today forms the basis of a world-wide, multi-billion dollar component industry. The reason for this expansion can be found not only in the physical properties of silicon but also in the unique properties of the silicon-silicon dioxide interface. However, silicon devices are still subject to undesired electrical phenomena called "instabilities". These are due mostly to the imperfect nature of the insulators used, to the not-so-perfect silicon-insulator interface and to the generation of defects and ionization phenomena caused by radiation. The problem of instabilities is addressed in this volume, the third of this book series. Vol.3 updates and supplements the material presented in the previous two volumes, and devotes five chapters to the problems of radiation-matter and radiation-device interactions. The volume will aid circuit manufacturers and circuit users alike to relate unstable electrical parameters and characteristics to the presence of physical defects and impurities or to the radiation environment which caused them.