Mujer Ángel, Gracielia Iturbide
Terror-Free Oil, Mitch Epstein
Les Recontres d’Arles was fun, it was also a long time ago. I spent a week living in a beautiful villa with Anna Fox, Andrew Bruce, Helen Goodin, Katie Bedlow, Mårten Lange and Yuri Gomi.
It was my first visit to the festival and I had high expectations. The festival still holds a reputation for the place where young/’emerging’ photographers from around the world go to launch their careers as well as hosting world class events and exhibitions.
I decided not to do the portfolio reviews at Arles, I’m taking things easy and don’t feel ready to try to market and promote myself it that way - I want to sit on my work a bit longer, develop it further - I’m in no rush. Also, I’m really not sure about the excessive cost of the reviews - €290 for ten 15 minute review sessions, it really is thinly veiled pay-for-the privilege networking.
Enough bitterness, back to the festival’s exhibitions and events - that’s the reason I decided to go in the first place! That, and I fancied a holiday in the south of France with my friends! There was however one thing that stopped me from thinking about this before I visited - the festival’s website. It’s terrible! It’s clumsy and frustrating to use, so I decided to leave everything as a surprise - and I’m glad I did!
The only event that I knew about before, and book for, was an evening in the old amphitheater with Mitch Epstein. This turned out to be one of my highlights of my time in Arles, it really cemented Epstein as a photographer I really admire. Before Epstein talked there were a number of other presentations including one on the tradition of Mexcian photography’s relationship to the land, another by Vanessa Winship (this years Henry Cartier-Bresson Foundation Award winner) plus presentations made by the six nominators for this year’s Discovery Award. This final presentation was intriguing as it offered an insight into public’s reaction to the nominees (Rut Blees Luxemburg had a pretty impressive cheer) but what was most interesting was the presentation of Michael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse’s project Ponte City that went on to win the Discover Award, it was far more informative than the information available at the exhibition and illustrated the huge scope of the project.
Mitch Epstein took to the stage at about midnight with the cellist Eric Friedlander and talked about his series American Power that was recently awarded the Prix Pictet photography prize. There was also a lovely video at the end of the presentation which showed Epstein standing on a ladder waiting, he was was then joined by his assistant who brought a 10x8 camera to him and they then proceeded to set up the camera together. It was fantastic affirming talk.
My two favourite exhibitions of the festival, by a long way, were the Graceila Iturbide retrospective show at Espace Van Gogh South and the New York Times Magazine Photographs exhibition.
I was introduced to Itrurbide’s photographs when I did my placement at the Hasselblad Foundation at the beginning of 2010. I got to spend plenty of time looking at a number of her books and stunning prints for the 30th anniversary exhibition of the Hasselblad Award (she was the recipiend in 2008). I’m very fond of her later work, which is concerned less with people and more with animals and objects - these were exhibited in the second half of the show in Arles. It was simply a fantastic exhibition of beautiful photographs by a stunningly talented photographer and I thoroughly enjoyed it, it really showcased the power of beautifully crafted prints. Long live the darkroom!
There were two New York Magazine exhibitions, unfortunately the tearsheets show was a bit of a let down due to the terrible reproduction of the articles. They were so pixelated you couldn’t read the text, which you would have thought was integral to the idea of showing the photographs in their original layouts. The photographs show however, was brilliant. Photographs from various assignments from the magazine’s history were presented free of their editorial context and there was a huge variety of names and approaches. Highlights included Ryan McGinley’s photographs of sportsmen and women, Gregory Crewdson’s Dream House (complete with letters to Gwyneth Paltrow and Tilda Swinton, contact sheets and polaroids), Lars Tunbjörk, Nan Goldin doing fashion, Sebastio Salgardo and Alfred Seiland. Probably the most poignant and touching part of the show was the correspondences between magazine staff after 9/11, it was a fascinating insight into the scale and sheer hard work that went into reporting the events.
Other highlights of the festival were to be found at Le Méjan where the Paris-based Galerie VU’ presented José Ramón Bas alongside a small selection of beatiful contact prints and a concertina book by Vanessa Winship. It was a lovely surprise to see that they were also screening a number of films and in particular A Film of Anders Petersen and J.H. Engström that Engström made in 2006. Galerie VU’ are a big supporter of Swedish photography and represent the trio of Christer Strömholm, Anders Petersen and J.H. Engström as well as Lars Tunbjörk. On the last free morning of the trip Mårten and I went to watch the film (it was in Swedish with French subtitles). It’s a phenomenally intimate film that really reveals and illustrates just how close they are to each other. This was made even more poignant for me as it had only been two weeks since I had assisted Anders in London for his Soho commission.
In the same building as Galerie Vu’ was a show exhibiting work by Cy Twombly, Miquel Barceló and Douglas Gordon. I wasn’t too fussed by the main exhibition, other than the fantastic space, however upstairs Douglas Gordon’s film 24 Hours Psycho was being screened. The film was back-projected onto a huge screen that floated in the middle of the attic space with bean bags slumped in a heap for you to fall into. Having heard about the work many years ago, and read plenty about it, it was lovely to flop into the bean bags and allow myself to be hypnotised as the film played out frame by frame.
From Here On curated by Clément Chéroux, Joan Fontcuberta, Erik Kessels, Martin Parr and Joachim Schmidt, was probably the exhibition that recieved the most amount of attention at Arles. There has been plenty writen about it in the press and amoungt the photography community, some good, some scathing. With the exhibition billed as the future of photography I found it very interesting that I had already seen most of the work in the show online, on sites like Tumblr. The show was a great way to see how people are using modern media and the internet to make photographic work, but I’m really not sure it’s the future of photography, if it is I don’t think I want to be a part of it… It’s really worth listening to Fred Ritchin’s interview with Foam at Arles to hear his opinion on the show, particularly to understand his comment that the show is “the McDonalds of typology”.
There seems to be a huge sense of anxiety about the future of photography at the moment and Arles definetely helped to fuel this, not helped by the continuation of Foam’s year long project What’s Next (surely the killer question is what’s next after what’s next?). However Les Reconres d’Arles did leave me with plenty to think about, which is always a good thing. I did have a fantastic time though and will definietely be going back, maybe in couple of years with my portfolio.
