FRANCE – ARLES
Acid colours, a wigged face, an inquisitive gaze…Finnish photographer Emma Sarpaniemi’s Self-portrait as Cindy sets the tone for the 54th Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles: in addition to the pre-eminence of women (artists or curators, as is the trend…), the distancing of the gaze and the staging of reality are the order of the day in this new festival, which offers no less than 44 exhibitions this year. These include Søsterskap – Contemporary Nordic Photographs, at the Eglise Sainte-Anne, featuring female subjectivity through the work of artists active since the 1980s in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.
At the Palais de l’Archevêché, visitors will be delighted by the strangeness and plastic, almost painterly beauty of the Assemblages by Saul Leiter (1923-2013). These are street photographs like no other, relegating silhouettes to the background, amidst almost abstract interplays of reflections, transparencies and blurs, flat tints of colour and interlocking perspectives.
“GEOGRAPHIES OF THE GAZE”
At the Sainte-Trophime cloister, the troubling sedimentation of Camargue landscapes created in situ and in the studio by Eva Nielsen with the complicity of Marianne Derrien, as part of the BMW ART MAKERS program inviting an artist/curator duo to produce experimental work around the image and its placement in space. Fusing optical and hydrogeological phenomena through superimposed silkscreen images and paintings, the Franco-Danish artist’s new Insolare series multiplies the territories (of images and landscape) that transport us into the ghostly spaces of memory.
Also, at the Sainte-Trophime cloister, Agnès Varda’s exhibition of photographs of the quays of the Pointe courte, Sète’s fishing district, used by the artist to shoot her first film, La Pointe courte, in 1954, also blurs the boundaries between media. As location scouting photographs, these highly graphic and realistic plates provide the substance of this film, a precursor of the Nouvelle Vague, in which Agnès Varda “dollies around in a 2CV before Chabrol, Truffaut, Godard and Louis Malle” and where, after opting for colour, she “switches to black and white, which makes reality more abstract “1.
“DES FILMS EN IMAGES”
“Des films en images” is one of the themes of this year’s Rencontres, which, in addition to Agnès Varda’s sumptuous black-and-whites, features the photographic work of Wim Wenders (at Espace Van Gogh) and Gregory Crewdson’s photographs “conceived as cinema scenes” (at La Mécanique Générale).
Finally, to mark the centenary of the birth of Diane Arbus, LUMA Arles presents Constellation, an exhibition of over 450 images (some previously unseen) by the master of strangeness.
- Patrick Roegiers, Nouvelle vague, novel, ed. Grasset, 2023
STÉPHANIE DULOUT
July 3rd – September 24th