Bernard Plossu, born in Vietnam in 1945, is one of today's best-known French photographers. His photos reflect locales he has visited all over the world: Senegal, Turkey, Poland, Mexico, Guatemala, and the American West. The photographs here were taken by Plossu in the late 1970s and are images of New Mexico--where the sun, the dust, the rain, the mud, the wind, the snow, the altitude (7,000 feet), and the smells forge a uniqueness.

"Bernard Plossu has given us a remarkable record of our own Southwest as seen through the eyes of a Frenchman. . . . The viewer knows what Plossu is saying by...