Photographic Arles 2022 (Rencontres d'Arles)

In 2020, the Arles Festival (Rencontres d'Arles), the oldest, most famous and richest in the world of photography, did not take place due to the pandemic. Last year it was held only on a limited scale. This year's official program for the 53rd edition, which runs from July 4 to September 25, again offered a large number of exhibitions - forty in Arles alone and fifteen in other cities in southern France, some nearby, such as Avignon, Nimes or Marseille, others - as in the case of Toulon - quite far away.  

Despite a return to the earlier scale of the pre-pandemic program, the festival has taken on a very different form. There has been a significant reduction in the number of exhibitions of great stars from history and the present, such as retrospectives of Martin Parr, Annie Leibovitz, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Duane Michals and Gordon Parks, as well as exhibitions that uncover forgotten important works from the history of photography. Presentations of significant museum collections and the number of screenings at the Antique Theater have been reduced. What has remained, however, is the wonderful atmosphere that draws tens of thousands of people to the Provençal city.

Last year, festival director Sam Sturdzé, an experienced curator of many photography exhibitions, was replaced by Christoph Wiesner, a German living in France who had previously headed the Paris Photo fair. He took over management of the festival at an extremely difficult time, when a pandemic prevented a number of planned exhibitions and the arrival of non-European guests. After criticism of the low representation of women in the 2018 festival program, the Arles Festival organizers are trying to steadily increase the percentage of female photographers on display, and are very proud that this year - as at the parallel Venice Biennale - they exhibited more women than men. 

The main exhibition this time was an extensive display of Feminist vanguard, which presents photographs, collages and records of various happenings or body art works created by 72 female artists in the 1970s and collected in the collection of the Austrian energy company Verbund. Indeed, these were often very radical and often provocative or ironic early examples of variously processed themes of female identity, physicality and sexuality, or grappling with the patriarchal conception of the world and the traditionally understood roles of mother, wife and housewife. The exhibition included great early self-portraits by American Cindy Sherman, who styled herself as women of various ages and characters. Also strong were the expressively repainted sequences of lesser-known staged photographs by Frenchwoman ORLAN, in which she impersonated various female figures from the Virgin Mary to a prostitute, or photographs by Slovakian Jana Želibska, immortalizing her naked body wrapped in plastic, symbolizing the degradation of a woman into an object ready to be dispatched.Equally well represented, through provocative sequences, was Polish woman Natalia LL. However, while Sherman, ORLAN or Želibská continue to create uninterruptedly to this day, many of the other featured authors are no longer active, and their work has been almost forgotten. This is no longer the case today, however, as the Verbund collection, founded in 2004 and still managed by Gabriela Schor, has been presented in fifteen cities over the past twelve years, often at such important institutions as the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna, the Photographers' Gallery in London, BOZAR in Brussels, the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, the Art House of the City of Brno and the Center for Contemporary Art in Barcelona.

For this reason, it is not, for Arles visitors, a hot novelty comparable to last year's exhibition Masculinity. The exhibition explored the theme of masculinity, male sexuality, male stereotypes, the changing social status of men and the female image of men. It was not limited to the 1970s period and focused much more on classic photographs by Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, Duane Michals, Wolfgang Tillmans and other well-known and lesser-known authors than the exhibition Feminist vanguard, in which for many female artists photography was merely a means of documenting various performances. Both exhibitions are indisputably significant, but it is a pity that they could not be exhibited in parallel, it would certainly have been a great opportunity to compare the different presentations of the female and male worlds. 

The festival program included many original exhibitions by various female photographers. Frenchwoman Noémie Goudal provided a fascinating spectacle in her multimedia works with the theme of geological and biological evolution, masterfully combining photographs and films. Goudal presented illusory models of various landscapes and plants in her studio and, through various optical illusions and movement of images, presented them in such a way that viewers were unsure whether her depiction of a burning forest represented reality or an artificially created fiction. Chinese artist Wang Yimo, in a series of Theater on the ground, provided details of abandoned industrial buildings and elaborate arrangements with dozens of workers on the site of a former power plant that exemplified China's successful industrialization. The author has been familiar with this environment since her childhood, as her mother also worked for an electric company. Renowned French artist Jacqueline Salmon has exhibited an extensive set of paintings and sculptures from a number of European museums, galleries and churches at the Réatu Museum, in which she has captured various depictions of the hipbands on the body of the crucified Christ. Confronting these photographs with original works by old masters and contemporary authors from the museum's collection created an impressive counterpoint. 

A retrospective of American photographer Lee Miller has attracted much attention. According to Art Media Agency, this is her one hundred and eighteenth museum exhibition. This time it was an extensive but very selective exhibition, focusing on commercial work rather than free art influenced by surrealism. This extraordinarily beautiful woman, who was the lover, model and muse of many famous artists, was presented only with her fashion photographs from the 1930s and the dramatic reports from the liberated concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald, which she created as a photojournalist for Vogue magazine. Many of her important works were represented only in small reproductions from historical publications. Including the iconic self-portrait in a bathtub, in Hitler's Munich apartment just after the end of the war, in which she arranged everything herself, but her colleague David Scherman pulled the trigger. At the same time, the exhibition made no mention of the fact that Miller was a model for many famous works by Man Ray or Pablo Picasso. 

Few festival regulars probably understood why one of the most beautiful and important exhibition spaces in Arles - the Gothic church of St. Anne - was earmarked for a retrospective of French-American filmmaker Babetta Mangolte, whose photographs, unlike her films, were not yet well known. The place where David Bailey, Josef Koudelka or Don McCullin exhibited and where Libuše Jarcovjáková, three years ago, attracted a lot of attention not only with her raw photographs of wild life in communist Czechoslovakia, but also with their highly imaginative installation. This time, there were, completely without any idea hung, illustrative photographs of various dances and performances by Trisha Braun or Yvonne Rainer, or shots from Robert Wilson's staging. Curator María Inés Rodríguez dissolves in the introductory text: "Mangolte attempts to capture movements in space, to explore a variety of temporal conditions. Her work testifies to the sensibility of an artist interested in experiencing time and reflecting on history." In fact, the vast majority of the shots only descriptively record situations on stage; they resemble photographs taken with a camera on a tripod in the front row of the audience. The exhibition would fit much better into the program of a dance festival than as one of the main events of a prestigious photography festival.    

In counterpoint, a great discovery was the exhibition of the Heal the world, which presented some six hundred works from the extensive Geneva collection of the Red Cross and Red Crescent at the Archbishop's Palace. Its curators, Nathalie Herschdorfer and Pascal Hufschmid, searched for two years through the organization's vast archives, from which they eventually selected both the famous humanistic photographs of Magnum members Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Werner Bischof and Paolo Pellegrini, as well as previously unpublished images showing the dedicated work of Red Cross workers and volunteers during both world wars and many other conflicts or various disasters. Many of them were not only raw records of reality, but had great emotional power and artistic merit. Also revealing was a retrospective of Luxembourg-based photographer, sculptor, architect, designer and director Roman Urhausen, hitherto little known internationally. His photographic works from the 1950s and 1960s, covering a wide range of subjects and motifs from Paris market shots to urban landscapes, nudes and self-portraits to abstract images, were mostly highly stylized through unusual compositions, tonal contrasts or motion blur. The exhibition, compiled by Paul di Felice, showed well the context of Urhausen's work with the trends of the time in comparison with the works of representatives of German subjective photography Otto Steinert or Heinz Hajek-Halke, as well as representatives of French documentary Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau. 

Among the discoveries was an exhibition by American Mitsch Epstein, consisting of previously unpublished works the author created during eight trips to India between 1978 and 1989. Epstein brilliantly illustrated the great contradictions of life in India in his subjective documents, ingeniously depicting color and sometimes even ghastly confrontations of various parallel events. However, sharp social contrasts could also be found in some exhibitions of contemporary photography. For example, in the exhibition But Still, It Turns, compiled by renowned British photographer Paul Graham based on the works of nine authors who have shown contemporary life in the United States in many different ways. Or at the giant exhibition Dress Code, consisting of works by thirty authors, presenting a multifaceted sociological and ethnographic view of the relationship between human individuality and the social conditioning of clothing.

Klavdij Sluban, a Frenchman of Slovenian descent who has exhibited several times in Arles, this time presented himself with an evocative set of black-and-white photographs of landscapes, expressive portraits and details of static objects from Finland, Sweden, Poland, Japan and other countries, with snow as the unifying motif. Among the many examples of the use of digital technology was a new series of Beautiful agony renowned Catalan photographer Joan Fontcuberta, who, in collaboration with Pilar Rosado, has incorporated, from the Internet, shots of various people's screaming mouths in moments of orgasm into the faces of Donald Trump, Silvio Berlusconi and other politicians known for their lies and sex scandals. 

Many exhibitions have traditionally been devoted to photographs from developing countries. For some, political content exceeded artistic merit, but, for example, a review of staged and intermedia works from South Asia titled Imagined Documents contained a number of highly impactful works. Great were the intricately staged shots by Iranian photographer Azedeh Akhladi, showing various dramatic events from Iranian history, the mysterious images of a community of people living in the rainforest on the India-Burma border by Indian photographer Sharbendu Du, or the intermedia work of his compatriot Zeu Mehta Bhupal, who created and then photographed embroidered models of various interiors of an airplane, a movie theater, a waiting room or public restrooms.  

Several artists who were nominated by various galleries for the Louis Roederer Discovery Award presented themselves with their self-reflective series. Rahim Fortune deservedly received the top prize for his multi-layered visual journal entitled I Can't Stand to See You Cry about his life as an African-American returning from New York to his native Texas during the pandemic, his aging father, his friends, his childhood memories, and the divided American society. Demalya Roy Choudhuri, an Indian, has created a sad series of metaphorically conceived black-and-white and color authentic snapshots, self-portraits, arranged scenes and archival images about his departure from his native country to the culturally very different United States and his relationship with a friend who committed suicide in India, where homosexuals are still persecuted and ostracized. 

Unfortunately, the large exhibition of photography books and catalogs was replaced for the second time by an intimate exhibition of publications selected by an expert jury. And it's a pity, because the exhibition in its original concept provided a unique opportunity to see often more than seven hundred publications from around the world. This time it was also not fully compensated for by the participation of more than fifty publishers in the festival's book fair during the festival's opening week in early July. This year, while the festival's official program did not include a single Polish, Czech, Slovakian or Hungarian author exhibition, it was gratifying to see that the first prize in the author publication category went to a book Strike, composed of vivid color photographs of protests by Polish women against restrictions on the right to abortion. Its author is the well-known Polish photographer Rafał Milach, and the book was published by Warsaw's Jednostka gallery, owned by Katarzyna Sagatowska.  

One of the reasons why the organizers so fundamentally curtailed one of the most interesting parts of the festival for two years in a row may be the lack of exhibition venues. Some of the industrial halls in Workshop Park, where many of the exhibitions were held, were being renovated; in the largest of the halls, the Luma Foundation placed only a few pieces from an exhibition by African-American artist Arthur Jafa, who showed the history and present of black residents of the United States through photographs, collages, films, sculptures, music and installations. 

For some of the exhibitions on the official program, it was necessary to travel to nearby cities. The European House of Photography in Paris presented an exhibition of portrait masterpieces in Aix-en-Provence called The Silent Language, which included Man Ray, Harry Callahan, Helmut Newton, Martin Parr, Diane Arbus, Philip-Lorca di Corcia, Nan Goldin and Rineke Dijkstra. British photographer Mary McCartney, daughter of the famous composer, musician and singer of The Beatles, exhibited at the Château la Coste vineyard art center. In a collection of delicate paintings by A Moment of Affection combined intimate shots of her own family with metaphorical photographs of trees, horses or landscapes. The Mougins Photo Center presented color photographs of ordinary people's lives in Liverpool taken between 1978 and 2001 by Irish-British photographer Tom Wood under the title Every Day Is Saturday. Their irony, stark colors and combination of daylight and flash strongly resemble the work of the much better-known Martin Parr, but many connections could also be found in the novels of Alan Silitoe, Kingley Amis and other "young angry" or the powerful new wave of British cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. Three venues in Toulon included an exhibition by one of the founders of the Arles Photography Festival, Lucien Clergue, focusing on his landscape details.

However, even in Arles, there were other high-quality exhibitions that took place in various galleries, hotels and empty stores outside the official festival program, this time without the Voies Off alternative festival. One of the best was an exhibition at the Omnius gallery, owned in Arles by Czech curator Helena Staub. It consisted of extremely impressive portraits by Ukrainian photographer Alexander Chekmenev, depicting, in the style of the old masters, Kiev residents determined to resist Russian aggression. 

However, the Arles Festival was not only the exhibitions themselves. Also important were dozens of different lectures, discussions, workshops, demonstrations or educational programs for children. Perhaps most important, however, was the fact that in a small Provençal town, photographers, curators, gallery owners or editors of various magazines and publications, as well as "ordinary" people who simply enjoy photography, could meet again.

Vanessa Winship, from the exhibition And Yet It Turns, 2013

Rineke Dijkstra, USA 1992

Rahim Fortune, Billy & Minzly, from the series I Can't Stand to See You Cry, 2020

Munem Wasif Kheyal, 2015-2018

Francesca Woodmanová, Face, Providence, 1975-1976, from the exhibition Feminist Avant-Garde

A woman of the indigenous peopleZapoteca poses in her traditional dress in a studio in Juchitan, Mexico, July 2019

Curran Hatlerberg, Lost, 2016

Boris Heger, Abata, Sudan, general view of a food distribution site. Located at the foot of the Jebel Mara mountains, this region is isolated. There are various armed groups in the area, 2006

Ana Mendietová, Untitled, 1972, from the exhibition Feminist Avant-Garde

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(translated by Michal Szalast)