Deep under the town hall in Arles, France, past some unassuming counters and down several narrow stairs, artist Sophie Calle has buried some things she can’t bear to part with.
Her show titled “Neither give nor throw away“, is a special exhibition at this year’s Rencontres d’Arles, an annual summer photography festival founded in 1970 that presents group and solo exhibitions of new and old photographic works in museums, churches, reimagined storefronts and parks in this Provençal city of 52,000 resident. .
This year’s edition of Rencontres, which will run until September 29, is entitled “Under the surface‘, and Calle’s contribution takes place in a labyrinthine series of underground caverns bisected by long arched balustrades. The shadowy corridors and damp, musty atmosphere are perfect for her work, in which she exhibits works from her warehouse that were damaged in a storm. Advised by restorers to destroy them, he decided to give them an underground afterlife. And so, the works are now “buried” in Arles, where they continue to decay, but have not, at least, been abandoned.
Calle — photographer, writer and conceptual artist — is one of France’s most acclaimed and prolific contemporary art creators. Family, absence, death, romance and archives are recurring themes in her work, which often combines images and text. In Arles, water-damaged photographs show a charred and discarded bed, formerly Calle’s, in which a man who rented a room from Calle’s mother burned to death, and a series of modest graves with bold markers: Mother, Sister, Child.
Others come from a series called “The Blind,” which matches Calle’s modest black-and-white portraits of blind people with her photographic interpretations of their responses, also as framed texts, when she asks them what they think is beautiful. (Answers include the sea, the color blue, and Alain Delon.)
While these works were grouped together because they suffered the same misfortune, Calle notes in a wall text that, except for “The Blind,” rot seemed to “choose its victims carefully,” attacking pieces that spoke of death or loss , as if they were already reconciled and ready for their doom.
American photographer Mary Ellen Mark also pays attention to things that are less visible: Her documentaries with portraits of subjects from all walks of life are presented at Éspace Van Gogh. in her first international retrospective, in which a Mumbai sex worker clowns around for the camera. An elderly couple shakes in a bar. and a young woman, her mouth open, holds her fist up in a feminist demonstration. (The show travels to the C/O Galerie in Berlin into the fall.)
Another important point is the 2021 series “Journey to the Center» by Spanish photographer Cristina de Middel, whose sun-drenched color photographs—such as an old woman standing knee-deep in a murky turquoise lake and a giant statue of the Virgin Mary strapped to the roof of an SUV—detail the migration route in Central America throughout Mexico.
Uraguchi KusukazuHis 1960-80s images of Japanese ‘women of the sea’, wearing all white and freediving for pearls, are stunning, as are his rather eccentric grainy photographs El Grupo de Calia group of Colombian “Tropical Goth” artists, whose unusual photographs of mysterious figures look like stills from horror movies.
And I was happy to see Rinko Kawauchi’s bright work a group exhibition dedicated to Japanese women photographers from 1950 to the present. The exquisite soft-focus images of the ordinary rendered superbly by the camera — “Untitled” (2004) captures, up close, a hair balancing on a child’s eyelashes — have long overdue a throwback Western.
At the south-eastern edge of the city is the LUMA Foundation’s ‘Parc des Ateliers’, an extensive green space in which architect Frank Gehry has designed a spiral stainless steel tower that resembles the cypress tree in Vincent Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’. , who came to Arles in 1888 to find a new way of creating art. For Rencontres, LUMA presents “Lee Friedlander Framed by Joel Coen,” for which the filmmaker (of Coen brothers fame) selected 70 photographs by the 89-year-old photographer known for his black-and-white images of the American social landscape.
The exhibition includes some of Friedlander’s famous self-portraits, in which he appears as a shadow in his surroundings. Instead, the emphasis is on works that show how the camera can trick, confuse and dazzle the eye. The selected photographs are dominated by horizontals and verticals – lampposts, railings, building edges, sidewalks, doors, frames within frames – that divide and break up the images so that they are illegible and almost look like collages or different worlds combined.
“Dallas” (1977) shows a busy freeway from an overpass, but the flattened light and railing that bisects the image make it appear as if the cars below are emerging from an empty lot. In “Montreal, Canada” (2002), a torn poster of a woman is lit from behind so that part of her face is illuminated like a ghost or a film projection. A selection of works captures the photographer’s wife, Maria: her silhouette through a backlit newspaper. Her sun-kissed half-naked form is overshadowed by the shadow of Friedlander himself. her smiling face through a car window thick with clouds reflecting as if she too were floating in the sky.
Photo dealer Jeffrey Fraenkel, Friedlander’s former gallerist, came up with the idea of the Coen collaboration, sensing affinities between the two artists’ works: bold narrative, strange compositions and single frames that hold the whole world or a version of it. And, of course, filmmakers, like photographers, know that each frame excludes as much as it includes.
In an idiosyncratic but fascinating choice, the exhibition also includes a slide show with all the works hanging on the walls, so that we see the photographs as if they were flipping through a book or simply walking through life — somewhere between photographs and moving images. There is always more to an image – ‘beneath the surface’ – than we can see. Often we need someone else to show us.
Les Rencontres d’Arles
Until September 29 at various venues around Arles, France. rencontres-arles.com.
