Les Rencontres de la Photographie

For 47 years “Les Rencontres de la photographie” has made its annual appearance in the Mediterranean city of Arles. Arles is known for multiple attractions, the most artistically notable being that Arles served as home to Vincent van Gogh for several years, but it also has the landscape of the Rhone estuary known as the Camargues, an exotic wetland region populated by white horses and flamingos. Rencontres means meeting or gathering, and in true festival form the 2016 meeting of diverse photographic tendencies is a grab bag of moments, and fortunately for us those moments are sometimes extraordinary. The event is not thematic but rather presents a survey of contemporary trends in photography.

If it could be possible to discern a general shape to this meeting it would be that this is a grouping of about 40 exhibitions and related events into three main practices: documentary, gallery art and new media. In terms of the layout of the event it has several overlapping pathways or spheres. This overlapping is the result of a new arrival in the city, the LUMA Foundation, with its affiliated artists, architects, curators and their attendant internationalization of what was formerly a relatively local and amateur scene. However, it’s not a simple arrival, since the family and the philanthropy behind LUMA has long been affiliated with Arles and in particular the Camargue and its wetland preservation projects.

Mehdi Meddaci, La Barque, from the series “Les Yeux tournent autour du soleil,” 2013. Image courtesy CNAP/Galerie Odile Ouizeman, Paris. © Mehdi Meddaci.

On one side, this is a lively and intimate festival supporting and featuring the diversity of photographic communities whose work is premised on the utopian potential of reproducibility in art practice. Since the arrival of LUMA on the scene, however, there has been a redefinition of this event where prestige, money and influence gather round the precious object. This is certainly an interesting tension in which reproducibility encounters the precious (cultic) object. In theory the former will melt down the latter but this remains to be seen.

Discerning an overall shape to the Arles encounter is complex due to the activities of the LUMA Foundation, which are of a different scale, including their purchase of an entire former railway maintenance atelier with its vast buildings. Also the construction of a new building by Frank Gehry and the establishing of a van Gogh Institute with its own contemporary and historical exhibition facilities. For some viewers the upholding of photography as an artistic and even amateur program will seem likely to disperse under the energy of LUMA’s philanthropic occupation of Arles.

Stéphanie Solinas, Dominique Lambert, 2004–2011. Image courtesy the artist.

Certainly there are illuminating moments in the festival, including the superb exhibition titled “White Gestures in the Wilderness,” a show curated by four students at the École nationale supérieure de la photographie in Arles. The four selected photographs from the Centre national des arts plastiques collection respond to the themes of intimacy, uncertainty and re-enchantment. A key example is a single photo by Duane Michals titled There Is Something I Must Tell You, 1986. The title line is handwritten above a photograph of a young man posed in front of a dark diagram of starry constellations. The man is framed naked, upper body with arms outstretched, and further lines of a poem are inscribed below, outside the frame of the photograph. Other photographs in this exhibition manifest this commitment to intimacy, personal experience and a soft touch. Even the one work involving a topical issue, that of migration, the video by Mehdi Meddaci, is relatively opaque, momentary and mysterious.

As has been remarked since its inception, photography is inherently multiple with regard to its discursive identity. Now, again fragmented and pluralized by digital technology, the debate as to its status as art or as industry has become again more complex. This interpretation is explored in the affiliated exhibition “Systematically Open?” organized by Walead Beshty, Collier Schorr, Elad Lassry and Zanele Muholi.

William Klein, Dance Happening (Tatsumi Hijikata, Kazuo Ono, Yoshito Ono). © William Klein, Tokyo 1961. Image courtesy the artist.

If “Systematically Open?” represents the new media dimension of “Les Rencontres,” documentary is well represented by the battlefield images of Yan Morvan, the superb images of Butoh dance by William Klein and Eikoh Hosoe, the domestic craftwork shot in southern Ethiopia by Hans Sylvester, and the ephemeral Secret Russia by Danila Tkachenko documenting forbidden Soviet experimental sites. The contribution from the contemporary art world includes works under the auspices of the LUMA Foundation and these are a predictable selection of some of the most established international stars. There are remarkable works by William Kentridge, Christian Marclay and Laurie Anderson. Less noteworthy are the sensationalized contributions of Maurizio Cattelan and Andres Serrano.

This scenario played out at Arles is the familiar one of globalization, big art money on the one hand and the utopian populism that pervades photography on the other. Nevertheless, “Les Rencontres” is a festival and therefore a very mixed bag. As the new Director Sam Stourdzé said, “A festival is not a museum.” Perhaps that is finally the question raised by this particular event in which the free time of festival faces off against the productive time of marketing. And perhaps at a festival such as “Les Rencontres,” the specificity of photography, with its range of practices from hobbyist to hyper professional, from the most finely crafted artwork to the disposable instrument of communications, has become so blurred as to have disappeared. ❚

“Les Rencontres de la photographie” was held in Arles, France from July 4 to September 25, 2016.

Stephen Horne lives in France and writes on contemporary art.