LES RENCONTRES D’ARLES : PHOTOGRAPHIC STORIES

After a yr of silence in 2020 and a restricted version in 2021, it was with nice emotion that we went to the 53rd version of the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles. The 2022 edition was considerably disoriented and sophisticated, but nonetheless powerful and profound, with numerous exploration and experimentation. Acumen’s editorial workforce reveals the highlights of the pageant between photographs, performances, photomontages and encounters.

It all starts with Babette Mangolte and the exhibition “Capturing movement in area”. Based mostly in New York in the 1970s, the experimental filmmaker and photographer documented the town’s choreographic and efficiency scene.

By photographing the physique in motion, the artist questions the very act of wanting.&

Enthusiastic about theatre and cinema, Babette Mangolte tells us tales by means of her pictures. Each of her pictures reveals the sensation of a earlier than and after image, as if we have been still watching the rehearsals, discussions and plays which are played out before our eyes.

An “eye-camera” – to use the phrases that greatest outline her – oscillating between totally different inventive universes, the photographer will develop into one of the privileged witnesses of this world in full mutation.

CROSSING

One other moment of emotion: the works of the artist Katrien de Blauwer and her exhibition entitled “The photographs she doesn’t show to anyone”.

By way of her photomontages, this artist, born in 1969 in Belgium, reveals tales which are as private as they are anonymous, with a profound intimacy.

A grasp in the artwork of the “minimize”, the artist collects pictures from previous magazines which she then cuts up, recycles and destroys, and to which she provides new life, as if to breathe new life into the clichés. The collage operates a type of universalization, underlining the impossibility of figuring out with a single individual, whereas permitting one to recognize oneself in history. It is up to each of us to see our personal…

GRAND ARLES EXPRESS / AIX-EN-PROVENCE

In addition to the 40 exhibitions organised in Arles, visitors may also discover 15 exhibitions outdoors the walls as a part of the Grand Arles Categorical. The “Silent Language” exhibition is one among them.

Comprising some fifty iconic 20th century works from the gathering of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, the exhibition explores the several types of relationship that exist between the photographer and his or her model.

Confronting intimate pictures, collaborative works, commissioned portraits and even stolen photographs, the exhibition addresses numerous photographic approaches to the representation of the Other. Removed from being a solitary journey, the portrait imposes an encounter.

“The Silent Language” proposes to retrace a few of these singular stories, akin to those of Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe and Man Ray.

OFF

Leaving it to probability to play the position of religious guide, we've got discovered three photographic artists within the Off who each work in their own approach on the physique.

To begin with, Gil Rigoulet, who began his profession as a photojournalist within the press and have become, in 1984, the primary official photographer of the newspaper Le Monde.

During his thirty years as a photojournalist, he devoted himself in parallel to a extra private photographic work, specializing in totally different themes around the body, water and landscapes in movement, or his private life.

One in every of these collection caught our eye: Molitor (summer time 1985). Bringing collectively vibrant and inventive photographs with an ultra-stylish aesthetic, she plunges us into a bath of freedom, in this place that has turn into legendary, the place the Parisian elite used to satisfy.

Cigarettes, ultra-tight swimming costumes, choreographed bodies: even at this time, the images bear witness to the wind of freedom that blew over a joyful and undisciplined youth.

Also value discovering are the black and white self-portraits of the artist photographer Victoire Orth. In her collection Corps à corps, produced with a mirror in a single hand and a film digital camera in the different, her pictures question our imaginative and prescient of the physique and femininity, and challenge the codes.