Johnny Depp
In 1970, three contemporaries of the arts came together and launched a photography festival that would become a summer hotspot for over half a century.
First drawing 200 visitors, it was launched by Arlesian photographer Lucien Clergue (1934-2014), the writer Michel Tournier (1924-2016) and the historian Jean-Maurice Rouquette (1931-2019), now attracts around 10,000 spectators to France's southern city of Arles (famed for inspiring the paintings of Van Gogh).
If Paris is the city of lights, then Arles is the "city where light is written," writes Patrick de Carolis, Mayor of Arles. Now a creative hub, the city’s annual festival showcases a new roster of young talents as well as heralded names in photography. For its 2024 edition (running from July 1st to Sept 29th), curators are spotlighting none other than the documentary, portraiture and journalism photographer Mary Ellen Mark (1940-2015). From an exhibition celebrating her work to numerous exhibitions on contemporary image makers dotted across the city, Les Rencontres d'Arles promises a carousel of exciting retrospectives, and exhibitions showcasing the next ingenues of photography.
Read on to discover our curated selection of photographers from each of the six main themes tethering the festival together: Tremors and Turmoil, Spirits, Traces, Parallel Readings, Re-readings and Emergences. According to Director of the Rencontres d’Arles Christoph Wiesner, each theme offers new perspectives from "photographers, artists and curators [who] reveal their visions and stories, not least that of our humanity, by turns thwarted, in endless redefinition, resilient, but also visionary."
TREMORS AND TURMOIL
MARY ELLEN MARK: ENCOUNTERS
Mary Ellen Mark (1940–2015) was a US documentary photographer, storyteller, and portraitist, who intrigued her viewers with photographs of people often from diverse backgrounds. What distinguished the creative from her contemporaries was the attention she devoted to her protagonists, in a few cases returning to photograph them again and again over the course of many years—thus forging close relationships with many. Characterised by her warmth, empathy and perseverance, her lens illuminated the lives of individuals who were overlooked or otherwise marginalised by society.
Her stories were often initially commissioned by well-known magazines such as Life, Vogue, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair; these pieces might then evolve into personal projects over time. Among these works, the exhibition spotlights the photographer's emotive projects focusing on institutionalised women in the Oregon State Hospital, street children in Seattle, as well as sex workers in Mumbai, the needy and dying in Mother Teresa’s charities and travelling circus families in India. In addition to her most iconic pictures, rare archival materials such as the photographer’s contact sheets, personal notes and official correspondence provide insight into the genesis of these long-term series for the first time. “What I’m trying to do is make photographs that are universally understood… that cross cultural lines. I want my photographs to be about the basic emotions and feelings that we all experience,” she said about her work.
Mary Ellen Mark. Feminist demonstration, New York City, 1970. Courtesy of The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation / Howard Greenberg Gallery.
Also on show.
CRISTINA DE MIDDEL: JOURNEY TO THE CENTER
Journey to the Center is a series that borrows the atmosphere and structure of the Jules Verne book of the same name. Photographed by Cristina De Middel, it presents the Central America migration route across Mexico as a heroic and daring journey rather than a runaway.
Cristina De Middel. An Obstacle in the Way [Una Piedra en el Camino], Journey to the center series, 2021. Courtesy of the artist/Magnum Photos.
STEPHEN DOCK: ECHOES
In 2011, at the age of 22, Stephen Dock, a young, self-taught French photographer, set off uncommissioned to cover the war that was beginning in Syria. Over several trips, he built up a body of work on the ground. He photographed Syrian resistance fighters, devastated streets, overwhelmed hospitals, protest movements and the tragic daily lives of civilians. Continuing on to Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Lesbos and Macedonia, his journey tracks the ensuing humanitarian and migratory crisis, beyond the epicentre of the conflict.
Capture, Echoes series, 2011-2023. Courtesy of the artist.
SPIRITS (YŌKAI), AT THE SURFACE OF REALITY
URAGUCHI KUSUKAZU: AMA
Ama, the Japanese “women of the sea,” have populated the shores of the archipelago for more than three thousand years. Free-diving for seaweed and abalone, their place in the Japanese imagination includes their sensual connection to the water, fearlessness and sovereignty. It's no wonder that Ama have fascinated poets and artists for centuries. Like his forebears, Japanese photographer Uraguchi Kusukazu, a native of Shima (Mie Prefecture) on the Pacific Coast, was enchanted by the free divers, and devoted over thirty years to documenting the lives of the Ama in his region. He captured deep-sea dives, harvests near the shore, portraits, collective scenes on the beach and in the amagoya—an exclusively female enclave—and the Ama's daily relationship with Shintoism, culminating in the summer at the time of the matsuri (summer festivals). His photographs exalt the age-old practices of the Ama, capturing their energy at every moment.
Uraguchi Kusukazu. Offshore, 1974. Courtesy of Uraguchi Nozomu
MICHEL MEDINGER: LORD OF THINGS
A former Olympic athlete, Michel Medinger is considered to be one of the most important Luxembourg-based photographers practising today. The self-taught creative draws references from
the golden age of Dutch painting, Surrealism and the Dadaists. Over the last four decades, he's honed in on still life allegorical scenes which celebrate the precariousness, fragility and beauty of existence. Each of his laboratory-developed photographs is the result of the careful staging of collected objects. His drawers are filled with old tools, bird skeletons, faded flowers, skulls, small and useless objects and even anthropomorphic fruits and vegetables. Fittingly, the in-situ exhibition-installation displays a selection of around fifty of his photographs in the guise of a monumental curiosity cabinet.
About Darwin, 2013 by Michel Medinger
TRACES, MEMORIES OF LIGHT
VASANTHA YOGANANTHAN: TIME FRAMES
Vasantha Yogananthan has been exploring France's Provence region since 2020, documenting its landscapes and inhabitants. Time Frames is the first chapter of his long-term project called Images Imaginaires.
Untitled, Time Frames series, 2020-2022. Courtesy of the artist
ISHIUCHI MIYAKO: MOTHER’S
Born 1947 in Gunma Prefecture, Japan. Lives and works in Gunma Prefecture, Japan, Ishiuchi Miyako is 2024's Women In Motion Award winner, and it's easy to see why. Her touching Mother’s series is, in part, an epitaph to her departed mother. "The belongings she left behind, which once adhered to her, had become useless without their owner," she says. "Before disposing of them, I decided to take photographs." Twenty-four years since her mother's passing, Miyako's photographs continue to reverberate a sense of loss, pathos, longing and unanswerable questioning. "Unfortunately, the photographs in the Mother’s series can never recede into the past, as they are reinvigorated each time they are shown."
Ishiuchi Miyako. Mother’s #35, Mother’s series. Courtesy of the artist / The Third Gallery Aya
IN PARALLEL, TOWARDS NEW FORMS AND NEW NARRATIVES
NHU XUAN HUA & VIMALA PONS: HEAVEN AND HELL
Nhu Xuan Hua and Vimala Pons have generated a collection of photographs depicting "fragments from all the houses that have provided us shelter, as well as those we have envisioned inhabiting." The household items residing within each dwelling are intimate reflections of those who lived there; "akin to body parts that carry memories" the pair explains. Within each frame, we can observe attempts at personal reconstruction and the desire to reinvent oneself. Influential heroines from pop culture, whether real or fictional, have inspired their characters, who express themselves through performative gestures. The artists offer a hybrid exhibition in which lived experience has taken over the space. Altogether, the exhibition proposes the idea that: whether outside or inside oneself, imbalance represents the contamination of image by reality.
Nhu Xuan Hua et Vimala Pons. Ses clics et ses clacs, 2024
VAMPIRES FEAR NO LOOKING GLASS: EL GRUPO DE CALI, VAMPIRISM AND TROPICAL GOTH
Ever Astudillo (1948-2015), Eduardo Carvajal (1949), Fernell Franco (1942-2006), Lina Hincapié (1977), Karen Lamassonne (1954), Carlos Mayolo (1945‑2007), Ana María Millán and Monica Restrepo (1975 ; 1982), Oscar Muñoz (1951), Luis Ospina (1949-2019) and María Isabel Rueda (1972).
This haunting exhibition concentrates on the visual culture of The Cali Group (El Grupo de Cali). Active during the 1970s and 1980s in Cali, Colombia, it was a creative gang who took an alternative look at social and urban fabric during the decades entrenched in major drug cartels. Originally composed by writer Andrés Caicedo and filmmakers Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo, it gathered significant counter-cultural momentum through its approach to film, notably with the critical documentary Agarrando Pueblo. The exhibition showcases their work together for the first time. Its prominent iconography draws from the myth of Caliwood, a term which has settled in the minds of younger underground generations, and is fuelled by ideas surrounding vampirism, the gothic and terror, staged in violent, tropical environments. Its counterpart, Tropical Goth, is derived from these artists’ disruptive analyses of the conflicting social and cultural structures of the conservative, provincial city of Cali and Colombia more broadly.
Karen Lamassonne. Sueño húmedo I, photography, crayon, 1987. Courtesy of the artist
EMERGENCES, SEARCHING AND UNCOVERING TOMORROW'S TALENTS
LAHEM: MODERNITY’S FRACTURE: THE ODYSSEY OF RETURNING HOMETOWN
A 2023 Jim x Arles Discovery Award winner, Lahem lives and works in Hangzhou, China. His camera explores the contrasting modernity of where he resides with the rural scenery of his home village Sibei. Nestled in the southern mountains of Jiangxi province, the village has evolved into a catalyst for dimensions like land, identity, migration, and transformation.
Lahem. New Year Celebration, 2013-2018. Courtesy of the artist
MARILOU PONCIN: LIQUID LOVE IS FULL OF GHOSTS
Marilou Poncin is a Paris-based artist who delves into the various sociological phenomena applying pressure on the female body in the digital age (cam girls, love dolls, female influencers). She investigates the evolution of our fantasies in the technological realm. Her installation is inspired by speculative design: through fiction, the artist imagines plausible technological objects. Its title alludes to Zygmunt Bauman's book Liquid Love, where the sociologist analyses the changes affecting the individual in a society where the bonds between people have dissolved because of a constant fear of rejection. Through faded blue lights and “palliative” objects, Poncin fills the space with the anxiety of solitude tethered to the physical, flesh-and-synthetic relationship.
Liquid Love is Full of Ghosts, video installation, by Marilou Poncin.
Actor Frédéric Radepont, galerie Laurent Godin, 2024. Courtesy of the artist
GRAND ARLES EXPRESS, THE WIND OF PHOTOGRAPHY BLOWS THROUGH THE SOUTH OF FRANCE
Marguerite Bornhauser: TRIPTYCH
At the invitation of the Institut national de recherches archéologiques préventives (INRAP) and the Musée Départemental Arles Antique, leading photographer Marguerite Bornhauser, created a series of works inspired by conventions with Pernelle Marcon, para-athlete and political scientist, Valérie Delattre, archaeo-anthropologist at INRAP and expert in the archaeology of disability. Bornhauser has devised a series that depicts the female body and the disabled body. Combining photography, sculpture and installation, her works are to be displayed in the collections of the Musée Départemental Arles Antique.
Marguerite Bornhauser. Triptyque, image from a work in progress. Courtesy of the artist
ASSOCIATED ARLES
NATURIST PARADISES
Are naturism and nudism the same thing? Why has France become a "naturist paradise"? As a museum concerned with society and around which a number of major naturist sites have developed, it was only fitting that the Mucem should explore naturism (in its many kinds) as a social phenomenon. This exhibition takes you on a journey to discover the very first naturist communities, pioneers who set up in France and Switzerland in the 1920s, and to learn how naturism is practised and experienced today.
