exhibitions in arles

Transcription

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42ND EDITION
Opening days: July 4 to 10, 2011
Exhibitions until 18 September
Press release - June 2011
Claudine Colin Communication / Constance Gounod / 28 rue de Sévigné / 75004 Paris
[email protected] / www.claudinecolin.com / tel. +33 (0)1 42 72 60 01
Free of rights pictures are available:
http://u000217372.photoshelter.com/gallery/Rencontres-dArles-2011/G0000_6yhrSYAhcY
password : arles2011
Les Rencontres d’Arles / 34 rue du docteur Fanton / 13200 Arles
[email protected] / www.rencontres-arles.com / tel. +33 (0)4 90 96 76 06
Private partners :
The Rencontres d’Arles also receive the special support of:
Prix Pictet, Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, Métrobus, Cercle des Mécènes des Rencontres d’Arles, SAIF, ADAGP, Leica.
And the support of: HSBC France, Air France, Communauté d’agglomération Arles Crau Camargue Montagnette, Ambassade du Royaume des
Pays-Bas, Mondriaan Foundation, Ligue de l’Enseignement, INJEP, SNCF, Le Point, Télérama, Connaissance des Arts, Réponses Photo, La Provence,
Images Magazine, Picto, Dupon Digital Lab, Janvier, Circad, Jean-Pierre Gapihan, Plasticollage, Photorotation, Orange Logic, ILO
interprétariat et traduction, Société des Eaux d’Arles.
With the active collaboration of: Musée départemental de l’Arles Antique, Abbaye de Montmajour, École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie
d’Arles, Rectorats des Académies d’Aix-Marseille, de Montpellier, de Nice, CRDP de l’Académie d’Aix-Marseille, IUP d’Arles, Museon Arlaten, Musée
Réattu, Domaine départemental du château d’Avignon, Conseils Architecture Urbanisme et Environnement 13, 30 et 34, Maison du
geste et de l’image, Parc naturel régional de Camargue.
Public partners :
MINISTÈRE
DES
AFFAIRES ÉTRANGÈRES
ET EUROPÉENNES
MINISTÈRE
DE L’ÉDUCATION
NATIONALE, DE LA JEUNESSE
ET DE LA VIE ASSOCIATIVE
MINISTÈRE DE
LA CULTURE ET DE
LA COMMUNICATION
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PROFUSION, PASSION, PERDURANCE
Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president des Rencontres d’Arles.
This year, 2011, marks the tenth anniversary of our festival’s new formula. I must confess to a secret, immodest
satisfaction when I look back on the Rencontres d’Arles—so beloved of photographers as well as of its founders,
Lucien Clergue, Michel Tournier and Jean-Maurice Rouquette—and consider that it has survived the reports of
its own death, belying the RIP or ‘Rest In Peace’ notices handed out at the time of its overhaul by certain persons
who in those distant days delighted in sinister acronymic puns: some notwithstanding real regret, others with
patronizing commiseration.
Remember that in 2001 the survival of this great, thirty-year-old project seemed very much in doubt. We had only
9,000 visitors and the budget, 90% of which was publicly funded, was overburdened with debt. Without a topto-bottom redefinition of the principles, format and concept of the whole, our prospects seemed grim indeed. In
2002, however, Mayor Hervé Schiavetti called on François Barré, who was my predecessor (he left in 2009), and
then François Hébel, for help; and these two set in motion a radical transformation that allowed a chain reaction
of happy victories. I, a new recruit to this adventure, am committed to paying homage to these two men for this
success.
A new policy of artistic programming was set up, centred around a number of grand prizes for photography,
awarded annually; these have flourished thanks to the increasingly generous support of Maja Hoffmann, who has
recently returned to Arles. The Rencontres’ Discovery Award, created to unearth new talent, stimulates a diversity
of viewpoints on artistic creation, thanks in particular to a regular shuffling of jury members. Working on the same
principle, a succession of experts and curators, changing from year to year, vary the programme (think of the
collaboration of such prestigious figures as Martin Parr in 2004, Raymond Depardon in 2006, Christian Lacroix in
2008 or Nan Goldin in 2009), thus avoiding the risk of a tunnel-vision that would shut off the festival to the great
variety of available talent.
Another sign of this magnificent growth has been the surge in exhibition space—from 3,000 to 15,000 square
metres—and the consequently exponential increase in the number of exhibitions. (Let me take this opportunity to
salute scenographic designer Olivier Etcheverry and stage manager Nicholas Champion and their teams, whose
inventiveness allows us to display works in the most unusual of settings.)
In this respect, the annexation of the old SNCF (train company) workshops was a decisive factor. We gave
this disused industrial zone, once a sad, sterile reminder of a forgotten golden age of railways, a new lease on
life. L’église des Frères Prêcheurs, reopened after years of neglect and disuse, added a certain historical cachet
to the estival. The new management team’s instinctive conviction—subsequently confirmed through objective
research—was that they had to reach a critical threshold in the number of exhibitions in order for the density of
shows to finally justify and motivate large numbers of French or foreign visitors to visit Arles.
At the same time, enthusiastic efforts were made to boost the festival’s name recognition both within and
without the photographic community. This was accomplished, despite the deplorable absence of a public relations
budget, through partnerships with such diverse media as Radio France, Arte, Le Point and others. After much
research we crafted a strong visual identity, something both original and offbeat, which we publicized thanks to
other private partnerships (Metrobus, presided over by my friend Gérard Unger; Fnac; Gares & Connexions and
others). Allow me to salute the remarkable contribution of Michel Bouvet, whose posters, taking us visually from
the vegetable to the animal worlds, have today become our emblem, our brand logo. We pay tribute to him in a
retrospective exhibition of his work for Arles, from the famous chili pepper of our earliest days to the bull-like
zebu that we will show this year: we have passed from weirdness to familiarity without losing one iota of an aura
of uniqueness which remains, it seems to me, eminently desirable.
We have been able to capitalise on an increasing popular infatuation with photography. There has never been such
massive use of various mechanisms to create photographs since the invention, almost two hundred years ago
now, of this magical process. The mobile phone now plays a decisive role and we have little need of the dramatic
sociopolitical events that we are currently witnessing to take full measure of its use. The programming wing of
Rencontres d’Arles takes it upon itself to stay at the cutting edge of technical improvements, as a guarantee that
we will continue to attract as many new fans as we retain old ones. You should know that the average visitor
comes three times every five years, but also that first-time visitors constitute 40% of the total.
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One way we have conquered this vast audience has been by prolonging the timeline of the exhibitions. Traditionally
these went dark in mid-August; now our season closes during the ‘heritage days’ of September,
August 15 being the high point of summer crowds, statistically supplanting the opening week
in July, which remains the preserve of loyal photo professionals.
You will notice that the Village event at the Forges workshop, the fruit of my suggestions last year, has been
rescheduled for opening week (4-10 July), thus following a format we worked out with photographers in 2010 to
facilitate attendance by the greatest possible number of publishers and bookstores, both large and small.
Today we can only delight in a success measured by many eloquent statistics. The number of visitors to the
festival has not stopped growing since 2001, on average by 20% per year, from the 9,000 figure cited above to
73,000 in 2010. Instead of the original ten exhibitions we now have sixty, the budget has grown fivefold and the
front office receipts have grown from 10% to 60% of the budget. Our exhibitions, 80% of which are produced
in-house, these days are often exported throughout the world.
The festival’s ‘new formula’—dare I call it our ‘New Deal’?—has, after ten years, taken up the gauntlet and
proved its efficiency. By serving professional photographers and the photographic community, just as much
as by helping slake the public’s thirst for this important art form, the festival has managed to diversify its
revenue streams via a dynamic public and business admissions policy (35% of receipts) and thanks to the
welcome support of an important group of private contributors (25%), whose consideration and friendship we
have been able to nurture. To this we can add the subsidies of the public sector at the municipal, departmental,
regional and national levels: all bring to the festival precious moral, and indispensable material support.
As far as the 2011 programme goes—a programme that I think I can say is as dense, eclectic and daring as it
ever has been—let me first take the historian’s approach, by focusing on what we can exhibit of Mexico in the
long term.
Mexico! You will forgive me for not passing judgment here on the chain of circumstances that led to scrapping,
to the distress of many, so many beautiful artistic projects that should have demonstrated this year in France the
friendship linking two great countries.
But I am committed to saluting and thanking the many partners and interested parties who supported us in this
fraught process, enabling us to salvage, more or less, the Mexican part of our programme; I cite here first and
foremost the efforts of Ambassador Carlos de Izaca, despite the painful constraints imposed on him; and Mr.
Xavier Darcos, president of the Institut Français.
The reason François Hébel and I fought so hard was that we passionately wished to demonstrate, in the teeth of
every prejudice, the richness of Mexico’s history of democracy and republicanism. The exhibition on the Mexican
Revolution—which we will be able to present, despite all the obstacles thrown our way, thanks to the support of the
Televisa Foundation—looks to be incomparable. It presents a series of unique images, enriches the photographic
archive of an event of major significance (and not only for Latin America), and unveils many new images to
complement those by Agustín Victor Casasolas that we already are familiar with.
On a related topic, how can we not be fascinated by the amazing history surrounding the rediscovery of Robert
Capa’s Mexican suitcase, salvaged and restored after the years of neglect following its disappearance during the
time of the Spanish Civil War?
I have a particular fondness for Chris Marker’s exhibition, which we are lucky enough to be able to present this year.
This indefatigable witness of the planet’s convulsions, this great traveler among peoples he wishes to consider
brothers, has produced films and photographs that have touched multiple generations. They offer a vision of the
world which is in the long term lucid, and in the end comforting as well.
I’ll leave it to François Hébel, and this is as it should be, to present the details of his programme, which was
created with the assistance of administrator Alice Martin, and conceived with the help of their brilliant team of
producers. I will only add that, having in the past been involved in understanding the effects of new technologies
on cultural life, I am particularly eager to visit the From Here On exhibition which focuses on how photography
is used online. This exhibition was conceived thanks to the great expertise of Martin Parr, Clément Chéroux,
Joan Fontcuberta, Joachim Schmid and Erik Kessels; it opens the door to a fascinating future and new fields of
creativity.
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So far I’ve been speaking on a satisfied, even joyous note. But on this tenth anniversary I cannot mute my concern
as to the fragility of our festival, a fragility to which, alas, I was already forced to draw your attention last year. In
spite of our stunning turnaround, the Rencontres continue to suffer the full force of the winds of fate. This was
amply proven by the cancellation of the ‘Year of Mexico’ and even, on another scale, by renewed debate over the
state-aided contracts that allowed us to hire our guard staff. Our financial structure, 60% of which relies on ticket
sales and sponsorship, exposes us to serious perils.
In this state of precarious equilibrium we must express wholehearted gratitude to our private partners whose
loyalty has never wavered: the LUMA Foundation, whom we cannot thank enough for the ambitious projects
they design and which should, under the guiding hand of Frank Gehry, start to acquire substance this autumn,
furnishing Rencontres with new exhibition space; SFR, which last year signed a new triennial contract renewing
and increasing its participation; Fnac; Olympus; BMW, which became part of the festival last year and returns this
year; Pictet Bank, whose award for sustainable development we have the privilege of awarding—and this does not
include many others, whose names I do not have the space to mention; they all know how much we owe them.
I must finally bear witness to our gratitude to the public sector, in the first place to Minister for Cultural Affairs
Frédéric Mitterand. Clearly conscious of the new relevance of photography, he has assured us, here as in Paris, of
his continuing conviction that our festival merits strengthening and of his intention to work toward that end. His
confidence and interest, ably translated on the ground by the Regional directorate for cultural affairs, are precious
to us. We are grateful for the wish of the National Education Ministry, mindful of our contribution to the artistic
and civic education of young citizens, to increasingly assert itself in favour of the Rencontres by signing a new
three-year agreement. I would like also to thank the local townships, the Regional Council, the General Council
of Bouches-du-Rhône and the City of Arles, without whose unstinting support the festival could not have made
it through forty-two years.
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UNCERTIFIED
François Hébel, artistic director of the Rencontres d’Arles.
In 2002, in the first edition of the new-style Rencontres d’Arles, we recognised that digital photography has widened
the photographer’s palette. Our exhibition Here is New York after the September 11 attacks concerned the first
phenomenon of the digital era in which professionals and amateurs all took part and in so doing recognised the
genre of ‘vernacular’ photography. Ten years on, the world has changed, so has photography—and its public.
MANIFESTOS
In 2011, five artists and artistic directors, all with long-standing attachments to Arles, signed a manifesto entitled
From Here On, declaring a profound change in the ways of photography, brought about by the dominance of the
Internet and digital creative methods in accessing and distributing images. This manifesto introduces the 36-artist
exhibition which illustrates the new creative reaches of photography.
Chris Marker—who is a precursor if ever there was one—was quick to seek new ways of using photography: from
La Jetée to Second Life, from the legendary ‘banc titre’ to his latest passion, the virtual gallery. This committed,
amused and astonishing traveller is represented in the exhibition by a series of black and white photographs, made
during his journeys around the world, and by his most recent colour series, taken in the Paris Metro, premiering
here in Arles.
JR, whom we first exhibited in Arles in 2007, is from a different generation than Chris Marker but, like him,
is motivated by political awareness on an international scale. He has always rejected the idea of fatalism—his
concerns are for the lot of his fellow humans. JR was recently awarded the prestigious TED award in the United
States. He will be presenting the meteoric development of his citizen poster projects at the Théâtre Antique on the
closing evening of the opening week.
The connection with Mexican artists and exhibition curators is something we have been keen to foster and, in
spite of the political upheavals, we are maintaining several exhibitions from this country whose photography, both
contemporary and historical, we find so remarkable.
REPUBLIC
With the support of the Televisa Foundation of Mexico an exhibition brings together vintage photographs from the
Mexican Revolution (1910), the defining moment in modern documentary photography. A very fine retrospective
of work by Graciela Iturbide has been set up with the help of the Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid and the curator
Marta Dahó.
Arles and Mexico are linked by long-standing friendship. After a visit to Arles, Pedro Meyer returned to Mexico
City where he founded the Centro de la Imagen, which has become the place of reference for Latin-American
photographers. When Manuel Alvarez Bravo was asked to create a photograph collection for the Televisa
Foundation, he approached many photographers at the first Rencontres, then directed by Lucien Clergue.
The Televisa Foundation also presents the work of the late Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa,
initially planned for the Conciergerie in Paris.
DOCUMENTS
At the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939, when France was on the point of caving in to demands from the
new Spanish regime, Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas saved Spanish Republicans imprisoned by the French
police in the camp at Argelès by evacuating them to Mexico. The suitcase full of Spanish Civil War negatives by
Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David (Chim) Seymour found its way to that same Mexican democracy. It is being
exhibited here for the first time in Europe after a first exhibition at the International Center of Photography, New
York, this winter.
Trisha Ziff, the person responsible for the retrieval of the treasure, is showing her moving film about
the adventures of that suitcase at the opening of the Rencontres at the Théâtre Antique.
The section of the programme about press photography celebrates thirty years of the New York Times Magazine
with an exhibition co-curated by Aperture Foundation, displaying the excellence of the magazine’s documentary
and portrait photography.
While photo-journalism is undergoing a violent bout of off-shoring and dumping which refuses to speak its
name, a projection evening entitled ‘mano a mano’ brings together the VII Photo Agency and the Tendance
Floue Collective, both very different from each other but each one a major influence over the last ten years.
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And also, the friends of Roger Thérond pay homage to this legendary director of Paris Match, who was a great
collector of photographs and one of the first members of the Rencontres d’Arles Board of Directors. Roger
Thérond died in June 2001.
POINTS OF VIEW
The five nominators of the 2011 Discovery Award have all recently been appointed to crucial positions of importance
at leading international institut. They represent the new generation of curators, publishers and collectors. They are
Simon Baker, Chris Boot, Le Point du Jour (David Barriet, David Benassayag, Béatrice Didier), Sam Stourdzé and
Artur Walther, and the selection of fifteen exhibitions they have suggested for this tenth edition is of the highest
quality.
The Discovery Award was the idea of the Rencontres in 2002 and was immediately supported by the LUMA
Foundation. It has been the occasion of invitations to Arles for more than fifty nominators over the years and
their extremely varied selections demonstrate just how wide the field of photography has become. It is very clear,
looking at the exhibition of prize-winning artists, that, though they were often encountered at Arles when they
were on their way up, they have all achieved considerable fame.
One of them, Wang Qingsong, prizewinner in 2006, is representative of the great movement in Chinese
photography that has been very present at Arles in recent years. The performance-fresco he is exhibiting
is 42 metres (138 ft) long.
The Rencontres programme is studded with many other exhibitions, projections, seminars, discussions and
courses and, as always at Arles, it is enriched by all the parallel initiatives that crop up.
The very beautiful Foam Museum in Amsterdam celebrates its tenth anniversary with the question: What’s next?
The LUMA Foundation programmes involve a seminar, a Trisha Donnelly exhibition, and a revamped version of the
LUMA Award that they inaugurated in 2010. The Méjan is keeping up its usual intense photographic activity with
Actes Sud and, this year, with the Lambert Collection, too. And, doubtless, Arles will be the scene of all the usual
unexpected events and happenings that delight us with their spontaneity and their militancy.
HAS-BEEN OR UP-AND-COMING?
For ten years, confronted by what may sometimes have seemed delicate, not to say esoteric, selections and
non-academic displays, some people have regularly questioned whether photography has had its day. To which
we answer with a resounding no. It has never been more dynamic, diverse or significant. Its territory shifts, it
acquires ever more tools, and the number of people interested in it or who practise it is increasing exponentially.
According to a French Ministry of Culture survey, photography has become the first cultural activity for French
people. Along with our partners from the public and the private sectors, we cordially thank all those visitors,
whether professionals, hobbyists, or students, that we meet in ever-increasing numbers each year. They are
the reward for all the work—sometimes harder than it might seem—that the teams involved in the Rencontres
d’Arles have been putting in for ten years.
Such large numbers are proof of the respect we owe those who have made the difficult choice of being artists.
This statute, far from putting them on the margins, puts them at the very centre of society. They are the
independent observers of it—its first critics. Our perception of the world is nourished by their gaze and their
open agenda. Long may they continue to broaden our outlook and lead us to behave with more empathy
in a society where we should think it a duty to stick together.
For all these reasons, I am convinced that a festival is a medium, a time of pause for aesthetic, hence political,
reflection about the world. I hope that these last ten years have distilled this message so that in the future it will
continue to escape not just the laws of the market but also those of rigid academicism.
I am convinced that photography and photographers along with the curators and the artistic directors, will continue
to surprise us with new grammars of the discipline, with ‘non-standard’ thinking—thinking that goes beyond
preconceived ideas about photography.
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ARLES AND THE RENCONTRES
Hervé Schiavetti, Mayor of Arles, Vice-president of the Bouches-du-Rhône Département Council.
The year 2011 at Rencontres d’Arles is looking to be both fascinating for visitors and complicated for its organisers.
This year’s edition marks an anniversary in the long history linking our city to the art of
photography. It’s been ten years now since François Barré and François Hébel returned to direct a
festival that had been losing steam, that had even stalled. Starting in 2001 the festival, to use one of its
director’s favourite terms, ‘changed format’. The number of exhibitions and events multiplied. So did the
number of visitors. So did the number of press reviews. So did the economic benefits for the City of Arles.
During those ten years photography benefited from an
unprecedented boost in international
popularity based on technological innovation and cultural enthusiasm. Photography became the art of this
planet at the start of the 21st century. Yet even forty years ago, toward the close of the preceding
century, the photographer Lucien Clergue, the curator Jean-Maurice Rouquette and the writer Michel
Tournier were still struggling to have photography recognized as something more than a minor art form.
If Arles can be seen today as the world capital of photography, it’s thanks to these trailblazers, as well as to
the dozens of tremendously creative people who have shown images here; but it’s also thanks to exceptional
organizers such as director François Hébel, former president François Barré and current president Jean-Noël
Jeanneney.
As if to spare us complacency or the (in our case unusual) pitfalls of routine, preparations for the
2011 version of the festival were complicated by diplomatic turbulence that led to the cancelling of the
Year of Mexico in France. Distancing itself from the polemic, Rencontres this summer will showcase
Mexican photography by exploring the extraordinarily strong bonds linking the art of photography and Mexico.
This year Rencontres, and Projets d’Arles as well, have particularly appreciated the confidence and consistent
support of Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand. 2011 will be a decisive year for the Parc des Ateliers
project sponsored by Maja Hoffmann’s Luma Foundation along with its partners, Éditions Actes Sud, École
Nationale Supérieure de Photographie, and of course Rencontres. The government’s decision to erect on
this site a National Centre for Photographic Heritage marks its will to group here the energy and means for
creating an exemplary project focused on future contributions to the heritage of Arles and the Mediterranean.
In the name of all Arlésiens I wish to thank the private and public partners who sustain the Rencontres: the
regional governments, first among them the Regional Council of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur and the General
Council of Bouches-du-Rhône; as well as LUMA Foundation, SFR, Olympus, Fnac and BMW.
I hope all passionate fans of photography will enjoy a fascinating 2011 edition of Rencontres d’Arles.
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EDITORIAL / p. 7
PROFUSION, PASSION, PERDURANCE
By Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of the Rencontres
UNCERTIFIED
By François Hébel, artistic director of the Rencontres
ARLES AND THE RENCONTRES
By Hervé Schiavetti, mayor of Arles
MANIFESTOS / p. 19
CHRIS MARKER
JR
WANG QINGSONG
FROM HERE ON
CURATED BY CLÉMENT CHÉROUX, JOAN FONTCUBERTA, ERIK KESSELS, MARTIN PARR, JOACHIM SCHMID
36 ARTISTS:
HANS AARSMAN, LAURENCE AËGERTER, ROY ARDEN, ARAM BARTHOLL, NANCY BEAN, VIKTORIA BINSCHTOK,
MARCO BOHR, EWOUDT BOONSTRA, KURT CAVIEZEL, TONY CHURNSIDE ET LES GET OUT CLAUSE, DAVID CRAWFORD,
MARTIN CRAWL, CUM*, CONSTANT DULLAART, JON HADDOCK, GILBERT HAGE, MONICA HALLER, MISHKA HENNER,
JAMES HOWARD, THOMAS MAILAENDER, MICHEAL O’CONNELL A.K.A MOCKSIM, JENNY ODELL, JOSH POEHLEIN, WILLEM
POPELIER, JON RAFMAN, DOUG RICKARD, ADRIAN SAUER, FRANK SCHALLMAIER, ANDREAS SCHMIDT, PAVEL MARIA
SMEJKAL, CLAUDIA SOLA, SHION SONO, JENS SUNDHEIM, PENELOPE UMBRICO, CORINNE VIONNET, HERMANN
ZSCHIEGNER.
REPUBLIC / p. 27
THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION
GRACIELA ITURBIDE
GABRIEL FIGUEROA
ENRIQUE METINIDES
DANIELA ROSSELL
MAYA GODED
DULCE PINZÓN
IÑAKI BONILLAS
FERNANDO MONTIEL KLINT
DOCUMENTS / p. 33
THE MEXICAN SUITCASE : ROBERT CAPA, CHIM (DAVID SEYMOUR), GERDA TARO
TRISHA ZIFF, THE MEXICAN SUITCASE (A DOCUMENTARY)
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
MANO A MANO VII / TENDANCE FLOUE
TRIBUTE TO ROGER THÉROND
POINTS OF VIEW / p. 37
DISCOVERY AWARD 2011
ARTISTS PRESENTED BY SIMON BAKER
MINORU HIRATA
MARK RUWEDEL
10
ARTISTS PRESENTED BY CHRIS BOOT
CHRISTOPHER CLARY
DAVID HORVITZ
PENELOPE UMBRICO
ARTISTS PRESENTED BY LE POINT DU JOUR
LYNNE COHEN
RUT BLEES LUXEMBURG
JOACHIM MOGARRA
ARTISTS PRESENTED BY SAM STOURDZÉ
JEAN-LUC CRAMATTE & JACOB NZUDIE
RAPHAËL DALLAPORTA
YANN GROSS
ARTISTS PRESENTED BY ARTUR WALTHER
DOMINGO MILELLA
JO RACTLIFFE
MIKHAEL SUBOTZKY
10 YEARS OF THE RENCONTRES AWARDS
EDUCATION / p. 49
ÉCOLE NATIONALE SUPÉRIEURE DE LA PHOTOGRAPHIE D’ARLES
AUGUSTIN REBETEZ
CLICKS AND CLASSES
WORKSHOPS AT ARLES PRISON
PARIS WORKSHOPS FOR SCHOLARS
THE RENCONTRES WORKSHOPS
PHOTO FOLIO REVIEW & GALLERY
BACK TO SCHOOL IN IMAGES
WORKSHOPS FOR SCHOOLS
RENCONTRES / p. 55
MICHEL BOUVET
EVENING SCREENINGS
SYMPOSIUMS
SEMINARS
EUROPEAN ENCOUNTERS AIX-ARLES-AVIGNON
THE RENCONTRES D’ARLES VILLAGE
MEET THE PHOTOGRAPHERS
ASSOCIATED PROGRAMMES / p. 61
SFR YOUNG TALENTS COMPETITION
LUMA ARLES 2011
FOAM, WHAT’S NEXT?
NICOLAS GUILBERT FOR THE CENTRE DES MONUMENTS NATIONAUX
LE MÉJAN
ARLES IN SUMMER / p. 67
INFORMATION / p. 73
GENERIC / p. 77
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EXHIBITIONS
MANIFESTOS
CHRIS MARKER
Born in 1921 in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Lives and works in Paris.
Chris Marker is one of the most influential and important filmmakers to emerge in the post-war era, where he often worked
collaboratively with, amongst others, Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard. Marker appeared on the Paris cultural landscape as
a writer and editor, winning admiration for the Petite Planète travel books he edited for Seuil beginning in 1954. Parallel to his
written commentary, Marker also became identified for his uniquely expressive non-fiction films, eschewing traditional narrative
technique and working from a deeply political vein. Marker began garnering international recognition in 1963 with the sciencefiction short film La Jetée, a hugely influential story of nuclear experimentation and time travel. In the seventies Marker worked
increasingly by himself creating documentaries both on the history of the left (Le Fond de l’air est rouge, 1977) and meditations
on travel and memory (Sans Soleil, 1982). From 1952 to 2004, Marker has realised over forty films.
Chris Marker’s retrospective in Arles presents more than 300 works, produced between 1957 and 2010.
Coréennes is a project made in 1957 when Chris Marker was one of the few journalists who could still explore
North Korea freely. The resulting photographs give an uncensored record of daily life, four years after the end of
a devastating war. Those strolls were amusingly rejected by both sides of the 38th parallel: the North because
it didn’t mention Kim Il-Sung and the South simply because it had been made on the other side of the frontier.
No such rejection appears in Quelle heure est-elle ? (2004-2008) although Chris Marker stole pictures ‘like a
benevolent paparazzo’, as he himself recalls. Inspired by a short unforgettable poem by Ezra Pound, ‘The apparition
of these faces in the crowd / Petals on a wet, black bough’, he started taking pictures inside the Paris subway.
His aim in collecting these ‘petals’ was to give people their best moment, often imperceptible in the stream
of time, making them truer to their inner selves. He started the experience with a wristwatch camera, hence
the title. Although he later used different contraptions, the title remained, reminding that the stolen moment
of a woman’s face tells something about Time itself… The same idea is developed in the series PASSENGERS.
‘Cocteau used to say that, at night, statues escape from museums and go walking in the streets’, explains Marker
who sometimes made unusual encounters of models of famous painters inside the Paris subway, eerie figures
lost in time. These images, in colour, illustrate the various ways in which people create invisible boundaries in
order to cope with modern urban life. The modern finally meets the tradition of arts in another series, After Dürer,
where Marker uses the engravings of the German printmaker and revisits them. Silent Movie and The Hollow Men
also questions the linearity of narration and history. The first installation presents a highly personal response to
the 100th anniversary of the invention of cinema, while the second one reflects on the European wasteland that
resulted from the First World War. The most famous film of Chris Marker, La Jetée, is also shown in Arles, as well
as a virtual event dealing with his recent work on Second Life, a platform accessible on the Internet.
Peter Blum, curator.
Exhibition produced in collaboration with Peter Blum Gallery, New York.
Projection: La Jetée, 1963, courtesy of Argos Films.
Multimedia installation produced by Coïncidence with the collaboration of Max Moswitzer.
Framing of some images by Circad, Paris.
Exhibition venue: Palais de l’Archevêché.
JR
JR has the biggest art gallery in the world. He exhibits freely in the streets, and it brings him to the attention of
people who don’t usually go to museums. His work mixes art and action and is concerned with commitment,
freedom, identity and boundaries. After he found a camera in the Paris metro in 2001, he used it to explore the
universe of urban art before putting it to work on the vertical boundaries, in forbidden basements and on Paris
roofs. In 2006, he created Portrait of a Generation, portraits of young people from the banlieue housing projects,
which he displayed in super-large format in rich districts of Paris. This illegal project became official when the
Municipality of Paris posted JR’s photos on its own buildings. In 2007, with Marco, he realised Face 2 Face, the
largest illegal photo exhibition ever created. JR posted huge portraits of Israelis and Palestinians, face to face,
in eight Palestinian and Israeli cities and on either side of the dividing security wall. In 2008, he set off on a long
international odyssey for a project on the dignity of women. And in the same period, he set up the project Wrinkles
of the City, recounting the history and the memory of a country through the wrinkles of its inhabitants, after
showing his work to the Arles public in 2007. In 2010, his film Women are Heroes was a contender at the Cannes
Film Festival for the Caméra d’Or. In 2011, he was awarded the prestigious TED Prize. His reaction was to state
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his ‘desire to change the world’—a project involving everyone and anyone in a large-format poster project to
convey their message. The first country, to date, where an action like this has already been undertaken is Tunisia.
JR creates ‘infiltrating art’, which gets posted uninvited. People who often live with the bare minimum discover in
it something totally superfluous. And they don’t just look at it, they get involved. Old ladies become models for a
day, kids turn into artists for a week. In artistic action of this sort, there is no stage to separate the actors from the
audience. After the local exhibitions, the images get taken to New York, Berlin, Paris or Amsterdam, where people
interpret them in the light of their own experience. Since he remains anonymous and doesn’t explain his gigantic,
grimacing portraits, JR leaves ample space for encounter between subject as actor and passer-by as interpreter.
JR’s work consists of asking questions.
Screening produced by Coïncidence.
Screening at the Théâtre Antique on Saturday, 9 July.
WANG QINGSONG
Born in 1966 in the Heilongjiang Province, China. Lives and works in Beijing.
Wang Qingsong worked for eight years as a painter working in oil. He was accepted into Sichuan Academy of
Fine Arts in 1991. After graduation, he moved to Beijing. Witnessing the drastic transformations affecting this big
city, he found that paint and brush failed to capture the dramatic speed of modernization, with the influx of new
ideas and consumerism. In 1996, he switched to photography, a better tool to get hold of the tempo and ethos of
urban cities, using it to stage large-scale tableaux vivants. His photo work, like pieces concentrating a multitude
of observations, vividly depicts the current China in his mind, referring to many unsatisfactory sections in this
blindfolded chase for urbanization.
THE HISTORY OF MONUMENTS
Since August 2009, I started to work with two hundred models over fifteen days, shooting the 42-metre-long
History of Monuments. This work is my reflection on what is told about civilisations, beauties, virtues, standards
and norms… The models are smeared with mud and placed into the carved out contours of the photo backdrop.
Chinese traditions are handed down from generation to generation with many documents on the historical
figures, poetries, literature, dramas, etc. Often the powerful people like to summarize their achievements
during their reign times. So each dynasty has its interpretations of its dynasty and the former dynasties.
It is undeniable that many such versions are misguided.
Wang Qingsong
www.wangqingsong.com
Prints by Picto, Paris.
Exhibition produced with the support of BMW.
Exhibition venue: église des Trinitaires.
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15
FROM HERE ON
The manifesto is written by the five curators of the exhibition:
Clément Chéroux, curator in the Cabinet de la Photographie, Centre Pompidou. Lives and works in Paris.
Joan Fontcuberta, artist. Lives and works in Barcelona.
Erik Kessels, founding member and artistic director of KesselsKramer. Lives and works in Amsterdam.
Martin Parr, photographer of the Magnum agency. Lives and works in Bristol.
Joachim Schmid, artist. Lives and works in Berlin.
Prints by Picto and Janvier, Paris.
Framing by Circad, Paris, Cadre en Seine, Rouen and Plasticollage, Paris, L’image collée, Paris.
Exposition réalisée avec le soutien de l’ambassade des Pays-Bas en France et de la Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam.
Exposition présentée à l’Atelier de Mécanique, Parc des Ateliers.
TIME’S GOLD
My car’s called Picasso
A name that people getting born around the world just now are more likely to hear for the first time in connection
with a car rather than one of the twentieth century’s most influential painters. Here we have a sign of the porousness
of today’s boundaries between art and popular culture, itself a reflection of the High / Low yoyo that’s been going up
and down for near on a century now.
Soon we’ll be celebrating the hundredth birthday of Marcel Duchamp’s invention of the readymade, since which the
concept of taking some everyday consumer product and importing it into art has been all the rage. Most of the historical
avant-garde movements—Dada, Surrealism, Pop, the Situationist International, the Picture Generation and
Postmodernism—delved extensively into the visual resources of appropriation, to the point where it’s now become
a medium in its own right. These days artists resort to appropriation the way their quattrocento predecessors did to
the camera obscura, or a Sunday painter does to watercolour. Everybody’s on the bandwagon: the artist currently in
the spotlight, the art student, the lady next door, my cousin—right down to the art directors of the big car companies.
All mod cons—and images too
The growth of the Internet and the proliferation of sites for searching out and/or sharing images online—Flickr,
Photobucket, Facebook, Google Images, eBay, to name only the best-known—now mean a plethora of visual
resources that was inconceivable as little as ten years ago: a phenomenon comparable to the advent of running water
and gas in big cities in the nineteenth century. We all know just how thoroughly those amenities altered people’s way
of life in terms of everyday comfort and hygiene—and now, right in our own homes, we have an image-tap that’s
refashioning our visual habits just as radically. In the course of art history, periods when image accessibility has been
boosted by technological innovation have always been rich in major visual advances: improved photomechanical
printing techniques and the subsequent press boom of the 1910s-1920s, for instance, paved the way for photomontage.
Similar upheavals in the art field accompanied the rise of engraving as a popular medium in the nineteenth century,
the arrival of TV in the 1950s—and the coming of the Internet today.
Digital appropriationism
Across-the-board appropriation on the one hand plus hyper-accessibility of images on the other: a pairing that
would prove particularly fertile and stimulating for the art field. Beginning with the first years of the new millennium
—Google Images launched in 2001, Google Maps in 2004 and Flickr the same year—artists jumped at the new
technologies, and since then more and more of them have been taking advantage of the wealth of opportunities
offered by the Internet. Gleefully appropriating their online finds, they edit, adapt, displace, add and subtract. What
artists used to look for in nature, in urban flâneries, in leafing through magazines and rummaging in flea markets,
they now find on the Internet, that new wellspring of the vernacular and inexhaustible fount of ideas and wonders.
For an ecology of images
This is hardly the kind of phenomenon to be understood via the sole and unique filter of its newness, given that the
works emerging from digital appropriation practices are not fundamentally new in the way Modernism perceived
the term: originality and revolution are not their goals, but they still take the thinking of the last few decades a lot
further. What they are after is intensity: by radicalising artistic stances they are beginning to make the boundaries
shift. To take one example, artists in this category are part of a significant trend towards the demythologising of
the artistic making that began with the early twentieth century, opting more for a celebration of choosing. Rather
than adding images to images, they are all for recycling what already exists, for applying a kind of ecology of
images. This makes the creative process something much more playful, with an accent on the unexpected,
the serendipitous and the inadvertently poetic. And another thing these artists share is an urge to drive home
the obsoleteness of criteria which were once the crucial factors in determining what was art and what wasn’t.
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The simulated suicide of the author
What the artists on show in this exhibition also have in common is an upgrading of the amateur at the
expense of the auteur. Their hero is no longer the technician, the expert or the professional armed
with their specific savoir-faire, expertise or métier and in quest of a certain quality, but much more the
amateur or collector, the impassioned practitioner of a hobby. At issue here is no longer the ‘death of the author’
proclaimed by Roland Barthes in 1968, but his simulated suicide. For the appropriationist working in the totally
digital age, the point is no longer to deny his status as author, but rather to play-act or feign his own death in
the full knowledge that he’s not fooling anybody. Clearly, then, the issue is one not of newness, but of intensity.
The small change of art
The digital appropriationism surge that this exhibition only begins to map—and then gauchely—tells us one vital
thing: we are sitting on veins of images, mother lodes that have been accumulating for almost two hundred years
and are now expanding exponentially. Like the different resources that are a natural part of our planet’s composition,
this form of energy embraces both the fossil and the renewable. It is also an extraordinary form of wealth. You only
have to dig a little and sift gently for the water of the stream to bring the first nuggets to light. And the gold rush
has already begun. On his grave in Batignolles cemetery in Paris André Breton’s epitaph reads, Je cherche l’or du
temps: ‘I seek time’s gold.’ Breton was one of the first to realise that as an inexhaustible source of marvels, analog
images constitute our greatest asset. His friend Paul Éluard, that passionate collector of photographic postcards,
said that his finds were ‘at best the small change of art’, but that they ‘sometimes conveyed the idea of gold’. The
artists making the most of digital technology resources in recent years have been working this vein. And working as
trailblazers too, pointing us down the path to riches.
Clément Chéroux
CLÉMENT CHÉROUX
Born in 1970. Lives and works in Paris.
Clément Chéroux is a curator at the Pompidou Centre / Musée National d’Art Moderne. A historian of photography
with a doctorate in art history, graduated from the École Nationale de Photographie d’Arles, he is the editor of the journal
Études Photographiques. He has published several books: L’Expérience photographique d’August Strindberg
(Actes Sud, 1994); Fautographie : petite histoire de l’erreur photographique (Yellow Now, 2003); Henri
Cartier-Bresson : le tir photographique (Gallimard, 2008); and Diplopie : l’image photographique à l’ère
des médias globalisés: essai sur le 11 septembre 2001 (Le Point du Jour, 2009). He also curated a number
of exhibitions: Mémoire des camps : Photographies des camps de concentration et d’extermination nazis,
1933-1999 (2001); Le Troisième œil : La Photographie et l’occulte (2004); La Subversion des images:
surréalisme, photographie, film (2009); Shoot! Existential photography (Rencontres d’Arles, 2010).
JOAN FONTCUBERTA
Born in 1955 in Barcelona. Lives and works in Barcelona.
With nearly four decades of prolific dedication to photography, Joan Fontcuberta has developed both artistic and
theoretical work which focuses on the conflicts between nature, technology, photography and truth. He has done
solo shows at MoMA in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and Valencia IVAM among others. He has been
guest lecturer in several international universities and currently is professor at the School of Communication at the
Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. His last books include Through the looking glass, La Oficina de Ediciones,
Madrid; Indistinct Photographs, Edition Gustavo Gili, Barcelona; and Pandora’s box, Actes Sud, Arles. Artistic
director of the Rencontres d’Arles in 1996, he was exhibited in 2005 and 2009 for the projects Miracles
and co and Blow up Blow up.
www.fontcuberta.com
ERIK KESSELS
Born in 1966. Lives and works in Amsterdam.
Erik Kessels is a founding partner and creative director of KesselsKramer, an independent international
communications agency located in Amsterdam. He works and has worked for national and international clients
such as Nike, Diesel, J&B Whisky, Oxfam, Ben, Vitra and The Hans Brinker Budget Hotel. He has won numerous
international awards. KesselsKramer comprises thirty-eight people of eight different nationalities and has been
in operation since 1996. It believes in finding new ways for brands to tell stories using whatever media is most
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relevant to their message. He has designed, edited and published several books of vernacular photography through
KesselsKramer Publishing—including the in almost every picture series, The Instant Men and Wonder. Since 2000,
he has been an editor of the alternative photography magazine Useful Photography. He has curated exhibitions
such as Loving Your Pictures at the Centraal Museum Utrecht, Holland, and at the Rencontres d’Arles in 2008,
after having been a nominator for the Discovery Award in 2002. He was one of four curators (with Lou Reed, Fred
Ritchin and Vince Aletti) of the New York Photo Festival 2010 where he presented the exhibition Use me Abuse me.
www.kesselskramer.com
www.kesselskramerpublishing.com
www.kkoutlet.com
JOACHIM SCHMID
Born in 1955 in Balingen, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin.
Joachim Schmid is a Berlin-based artist who has been working with found photographs since the early 1980s.
His work has been exhibited internationally and is included in numerous collections. In 2007 Photoworks and
Steidl published a comprehensive monograph Joachim Schmid Photoworks 1982-2007 on the occasion of his
first retrospective exhibition. In 2008, the Rencontres d’Arles exhibited his work.
MARTIN PARR
Born in 1952 in the United Kingdom. Lives and works in Bristol.
When he was a boy, his budding interest in the medium of photography was encouraged by his grandfather
George Parr, himself a keen amateur photographer, and in 1970 he started studying photography at Manchester
Polytechnic’. Martin Parr worked on numerous photographic projects after his studies and has developed an
international reputation for his innovative imagery, his oblique approach to social documentary, and his input
to photographic culture within the UK and abroad. In 1994 he became a full member of Magnum Photographic
Corporation. In recent years, he has developed an interest in film-making, and has started to use his photography
within different conventions, such as fashion and advertising.
www.martinparr.com
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REPUBLIC
THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION
PHOTOGRAPHS AND REVOLUTION
When I saw for the first time the photographs taken in 1911 by the Englishman Jimmy Hare in Ciudad Juárez, I had
the feeling of looking at something that was unfamiliar to me. This feeling was disconcerting, for the pictures had
been shot in my home town. Whence came this sense of unease? At first I thought it stemmed from the boldness of
viewpoint typical of this great war photographer. Yet, as the years passed, I realized something else had troubled me:
The concept of the Revolution that had for a very long time held sway over my imagination came from a set number
of images published over the course of sixty years, a collection that did not include Jimmy Hare’s photographs,
nor those of a good many others. Did it not follow that what was missing was a history of photographs of the
Revolution, which this time might include the point of view of almost every photographer who left us evidence of
this historic process? This is precisely what we have done in Mexico: Photography and Revolution. We have made a
particular effort in this book to discover why and by what processes such a large quantity of photographs were kept
out of circulation at the time, and what kind of impact that absence might have had on our country’s visual memory.
The exhibition that we are presenting at Arles represents a new challenge because, while it is certainly based on the
book*, it also requires building a narrative based almost exclusively on period prints available for loan to France. The
results have been extremely interesting because, far from creating problems for the collection, photographs which
were not part of the original editorial project have come to enrich it. What is more, based on the vast number of items
we were able to bring together for this exhibition, we can claim to have assembled here, beyond any doubt, a larger
and more complete exhibition of photographs of the Mexican Revolution and its era than has ever been seen before.
Miguel Ángel Berumen, curator of the exhibition.
*México : fotografía y revolución, Lunwerg Editores and the Televisa Foundation.
Exhibition produced in collaboration and with the support of the Televisa Foundation, Mexico.
Exhibition venue: Espace Van Gogh.
GRACIELA ITURBIDE, THE FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE COLLECTION
Born in 1942 in Mexico City. Lives and works in Mexico City.
Graciela Iturbide turned to photography only after the death of one of her daughters in the 1970s. She met her mentor Manuel
Álvarez Bravo, the teacher, cinematographer and photographer, at university and started taking pictures of everyday life, almost
entirely in black-and-white. Iturbide has been a strong supporter of feminism since her very first collection in 1979, titled Angel
Woman, and in her collection Our Lady of the Iguana, shot in a city where women dominate town life. In Mexico, she is renowned
for being a founding member of the Mexican Council of Photography. Her work is now shown all around the world, and she
has travelled in Argentina, India and the United States where she won the W. Eugene Smith prize and recently the Hasselblad
Foundation Photography Award (2008).
Graciela Iturbide is one of the most outstanding Mexican photographers on the contemporary world scene.
Over a four-decade career she has built an œuvre that is intense and deeply singular, fundamental for
understanding the development of photography in Mexico and the rest of Latin America. Her contribution
and talent have been recognised with the recent granting (2008) of the Hasselblad Award, the world’s highest
distinction in photography. Renowned for her portraits of the Seri Indians, who inhabit the desert region of
Sonora, for her vision of the women of Juchitán (on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca), and for her
fascinating essay on the birds that she has spent so many years photographing, Graciela Iturbide’s visual itinerary
has spanned such contrasting countries as Spain, United States, India, Italy and Madagascar in addition to her
native Mexico. Her curiosity about the different forms of cultural diversity have turned travel into a work dynamic
through which she expresses her artistic need: ‘to photograph as a pretext for getting to know’, as she herself
puts it. Midway between the documentary and the poetic, her unusual way of looking through the lens integrates
what has been experienced and what has been dreamed in a complex web of historical, social and cultural
references. The fragility of ancestral traditions and their difficult survival, the interaction between nature and
culture, the importance of ritual in everyday body language and the symbolic dimension of landscapes and
randomly found objects are paramount to her richly productive career. Her work is characterised by an ongoing
dialogue among images, times and symbols, in a poetic display in which dream, ritual, religion, travel and community
all blend together. The exhibition presents one of the most comprehensive anthologies of her career to date.
Marta Dahó, commissaire de l’exposition.
Exposition réalisée par la FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE avec la collaboration des Rencontres d’Arles.
Exposition présentée à l’Espace Van Gogh.
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GABRIEL FIGUEROA, THE WIDE-RANGING EYE
Born in 1907 in Mexico City. Died in 1997 in Mexico City.
Gabriel Figueroa lost his father and mother shortly after his birth. Cared for by his aunts, he was encouraged to pursue his
interest in the arts, and a family bankruptcy led to him working, at the age of fourteen, in the darkroom of a photography studio.
In 1932 he made his debut in the movie industry as a stills photographer, with the help of cameraman Alex Phillips Sr.
Phillips then found him a scholarship to go to Hollywood, and under the auspices of Gregg Toland he learnt all about lighting
in Sam Goldwyn’s studio. Back in Mexico, in 1936 he made his first film as cameraman, Allá en el Rancho Grande, with director
Fernando de Fuentes; the film took first prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1938. The Figueroa style really took shape when he
met Emilio Fernández in 1943: they would go on to make twenty-six films together during what was the golden age of Mexican
cinema. In 1950 he met Luis Buñuel, with whom he made seven films. Despite many attempts to put him under contract—by
Orson Welles and Walt Disney, among others—Figueroa never gave up the creative freedom he found in his home country.
Gabriel Figueroa Mateos brought his wide-ranging eye to bear on more than half a century of Mexican cinema.
In the course of a prolific image-making career he was a studio portraitist, photojournalist, stills man, lighting
engineer, cameraman, director of photography and an emblematic figure in a dream factory that provided
several gener
ations of Mexicans with entertainment and an initiation into the world of the emotions.
The Figueroa filmography comprises over two hundred works displaying his technical skill, mastery of sophisticated
framing and light and shade, an aesthetic affinity with the other visual arts and an ability to adapt to the changing
rhythms of an art that was as much an industry as a form of diversion. Acclaimed at the world’s leading film
festivals for his talent with lighting and the camera, he was called on by such celebrated directors as John
Ford, Luis Buñuel and John Huston. This exhibition in the form of a video installation offers an overview of
the vivid repertoire of someone who brought to the screen the passions, faces and landscapes of a people
chosen by the sun and darkly overwhelmed by tragedy. Moving through the exhibition, the viewer will discover,
even if only fragmentarily, the sheer diversity of the genres Figueroa’s calling embraced: thrillers, comedies,
tragicomedies, melodramas, historical epics and adaptations of novels and serials. A trip through the real and
illusory worlds the eye of a cameraman has enabled viewers to see, glimpse or imagine, the exhibition above
all confirms the existence of a multitude of Mexicos—some of them no more than pure images of seduction...
Alfonso Morales, curator of the exhibition
Exhibition produced by the Televisa Foundation in collaboration with the Rencontres d’Arles.
Exhibition venue: église des Frères-Prêcheurs.
ENRIQUE METINIDES
Enrique Metinides Tsironides was born into a family of Greek immigrants living in Mexico. At the age of ten his father gave him his
first camera. He shot his first rolls of street life and stills inspired by his favorite gangster movies. At twelve he began photographing
the work of the police and worked with the photographer ‘El Indio’ for the newspaper La Prensa. He only resigned in 1997, when
the newspaper was bought and he and 450 co-op members found themselves unemployed. In 2000 the first book of Metinides,
El Teatro de los Hechos, was published. Since then, Metinides’ work has been seen in major group shows in Mexico City, PS1
New York, Photo España, San Francisco MOMA and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Solo exhibitions include Anton
Kern Gallery in New York and Blum and Poe in Los Angeles. Two exhibitions are also planned this year in Berlin and New York.
101 TRAGEDIES
101 Tragedies brings together a collection of photographs and narratives by the Mexican photographer Enrique
Metinides, who makes his own selection of images and tells his own stories. Metinides remembers everything;
the streets, the characters, the families, the sadness, as much as the heroism of the emergency workers and the
‘audience’ of onlookers relieved to be watching, not participating in the dramas he captures. Metinides catalogues
his images according to type: train, bicycle, car or bus accident / plane crash / suicide / murder / hanging / drowning—
everything is meticulously filed, stored, recorded. He creates order from the madness of the witnessed chaos he
has photographed. Metinides’ work is unique and stands apart from contemporary tabloid drama photography,
Nota Roja, which still sells on the streets of Mexico City. His images are distinct from the new sensationalism; his
photographs, while powerful, are often filled with their own humanity, with their sense of detail and their awareness
of both accident and cultural context. His work is cinematic at times and intimate at others, and his photographs
present themselves as short narratives—single frame movies, so to speak. As a child Metinides loved to go to
the cinema and shoot stills from the screen, and their influence is evident in his photography. His home is filled
with a DVD collection that ranges from Cagney to contemporary car chase spectaculars. Metinides is a film maker
of stills. Metinides has worked in Mexico City all his life—rarely leaving the city, never leaving the country; yet
he has probably seen more than most. Now retired from the streets, he has begun a new series of works that
revisit the scenes he once witnessed and documented. He creates hybrid images by bringing into the frame the
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toys of his massive collection of miniature firemen, police and ambulance workers against the backdrop of his
original images like a stage set of earlier work. In this way he creates new works that hover on the edge of childlike innocence, horror and the absurd. Metinides does not belong in the tabloid world of this millennium; his work
has little to do with the formulaic sensationalism of the present or with the narcotics drama which represents
contemporary Mexico in the media. His work is unique, guided by his own reflections of a lifetime’s work. 101
Tragedies is a series of single frame films. Narrated by Metinides. Told through his stills and his words.
Trisha Ziff, co-curator of the exhibition, with Enrique Metinides, Guillaume Zuili and Lucía González de Durana Villa.
Prints by LMI, Mexico and Dupon, Paris.
Framing by Jean-Pierre Gapihan, Paris.
Exhibition produced with 212 BERLIN, Mexico City and KLMI fotolabs, Mexico.
Exhibition venue: Atelier des Forges, Parc des Ateliers.
DANIELA ROSSELL
Born in 1973 in Mexico. Lives and works in New York.
After studying theatre in Mexico, Daniela Rossell specialized in painting at the National School of Visual Arts in Mexico in
1993. At the age of twenty-three her works were shown at a solo exhibition at Galeria OMR in Mexico. Her series Ricas y
famosas (Rich and Famous) has been exhibited at Salamanca, Spain (2003); at the Centro Cultural de Caja Tenerife, in the
Canary Islands; at PhotoEspaña in Madrid, as well as at venues in Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles. She is represented by
the Greene Naftali Gallery in New York City. Her work has also appeared in group shows, including Tendencies: New Art from
Mexico City in Vancouver, Canada; Hybrid Cultures: Works from Mexico City and Montreal in Montreal; and at Hierbabuena
Center for the Arts in San Francisco, in the Mexcelente exhibition. Her publication: Ricas y famosas (Turner, 2002, 176 pages).
PRIVATE WORLDS, PUBLIC ILLUSIONS
There is one image in Ricas y famosas that depicts very clearly the complex relationship of complicity underlying
photographer Daniela Rossell’s book about the identity, domesticity and imagery of Mexico’s upper classes. In front
of a mural of an orientalist harem, eight women pose, as though they too were odalisques. […] While the painted
odalisques appear indifferent to our imaginary visit, the ‘real ones’ face the camera with a tremendous sense of self,
almost always gazing directly into the lens… All eight women appear to be bold about the photographic image, yet at
the same time afraid of it. They know they are making their faces and bodies available for public consumption, and they
have adopted conventional poses from film and magazines for the purpose. […] More than the papers the women
may have signed to release the photographer from any charge of intrusion into their private lives, the photographs
themselves acknowledge to perfection the existence of a contract. These women have used the photographer as
much as she has used them. What makes Rossell’s images so radical is not simply that they open the doors of houses
closed off to us by bodyguards. (The gossip magazines and society pages in the newspaper do that already, and no
one bats an eye.) More than showing us how the privileged live, Ricas y famosas conjures up the way they would
like to live, what they imagine they are like. All of Rossell’s photographs depict a contradictory multitude of fantasies
acquired in a disorderly fashion from antiques shops, department stores, safaris. They document one class’s desperate
effort to create ‘someplace else’ that is distinct from the collage of abject rural poverty in which the rest of us live. […]
Ricas y famosas is, therefore, a traveller’s guide through a series of pseudo-aristocratic tropical Disneylands: escapist locales populated equally by the ghosts of revolutionary priista (Revolutionary and Institutional Party of Mexico)
iconography, the unbearable sentimentalism of stuffed animals, and—more often than one might like—works of art.
[…] The task of contemporary art is often not so much to comment as it is to compel comment… Politically, its effect
is to intervene in the indifferent flow of signs and images. What gives Rossell’s book its merit is not so much having
produced a thesis about the people she portrayed, but rather putting into circulation visual objects that force viewers
to portray themselves in public. […] Rossell’s art is one of provocation. It’s provoking a cascade of commentary.
Cuauhtémoc Medina
From review: C. Medina: ‘El Ojo Breve. Mundos privados, ilusiones públicas’, Reforma. September 11, 2002. Translated by Trudy Balch in Witness to
Her Art. Art and Writings by Adrian Piper, Mona Hatoum, Cady Noland, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker, Daniela Rossell and Eau de Cologne. Edited by Rhea
Anastas with Michael Brenson. Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 2006, p. 332.
Prints by: BS Imagen Virtual, Mexico.
MAYA GODED
Maya Goded began studying photography and sociology in Mexico City in 1985 before leaving for the International Center of
Photography in New York. She started working in 1993 as assistant to the photographer Graciela Iturbide. In 2001 she was the recipient of the prestigious W. Eugene Smith Fund Award for her work with prostitutes in Mexico City, Plaza de la Soledad. In 2007,
her exhibition Let’s all go back to the streets was held at the Casa de América in Madrid, in 2007, and in the same year another
exhibition of her work was held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Mexico City. She has exhibited in the United States, Canada,
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Latin America, Europe and China. Her publications include Nosotras (Filigranes, 2004) and Good Girls (Umbridge, 2006).
WELCOME TO LIPSTICK
These photographs were taken in a red-light district close to the Mexico-United States border, behind walls concealing
the prostitutes from the rest of society. Violent and lawless, this once-flourishing neighbourhood now seems entirely
inhabited by ghosts, and few people dare to visit. But despite this decline, these women’s struggle for survival
keeps their district alive.
LAND OF WITCHES
After finishing the work on the series Missing about the women who disappeared or were killed on the Mexican
border of the USA, the need to change destiny, do justice to impunity and work on my own fear was born.
So I decided to make a few trips to northern Mexico, to look for my own healing, and restore my love for
photography. After these trips, the photographic series called Land of Witches was created. In Latin America,
the Spanish conquest brought with Catholicism the persecution of women related to witchcraft, both Spanish
and indigenous. These local people, called ‘shamans’ or witch doctors, had a great knowledge of herbs and
the balance with their environment. Although the witchhunt was a common practice, these beliefs continued
to be practised clandestinely and are still alive throughout Mexico. The witches I look for, in the most Catholic
states, are a mix of European and indigenous. In these villages everybody goes to look for them but, fearing
their power, in the end they become outcasts because they are different from other women living in the village.
Maya Goded
Framing by Jean-Pierre Gapihan and Plasticollage, Paris (for Land of Witches).
Screening produced by Maya Goded and Coïncidence (for Welcome to Lipstick).
DULCE PINZÓN
Née en 1974 à Mexico. Vit et travaille à Brooklyn.
Dulce Pinzón studied mass media communications at the Universidad de las Américas in Puebla Mexico and photography at
Indiana University of Pennsylvania. In 1995 she moved to New York where she studied at the International Center of Photography.
Her work has been published and collected internationally. In 2001 her photos were used for the cover of a publication of Howard
Zinn’s book A People’s History of the United States. In 2002 she won the prestigious Jóvenes Creadores grant in Mexico for
her work, the twelfth edition of the Mexican Biennial of El Centro de La Imagen and was a 2006 fellow in photography from
the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2008 she was a Ford Foundation grantee and in 2010 she recieved an award from the
Gaea Foundation/Sea Change Residency for her series The Real Story of the Superheroes. She recently took first place in the
Sixth International Photography Symposium: Mazatlán Abierto for the same series. Now she is planning to publish her first
photography book.
THE REAL STORY OF THE SUPERHEROES
After September 11, the notion of the ‘hero’ began to rear its head in the public consciousness more and more
frequently. It served a necessity, in a time of national and global crisis, to acknowledge those who showed
extraordinary determination in the face of danger, sometimes even sacrificing their lives in an attempt to save others.
However, in the whirlwind of journalism surrounding these deservedly front-page disasters and emergencies,
it is easy to take for granted the heroes who sacrifice immeasurable life and labor in their day-to-day lives for
the good of others, but do so in a somewhat less spectacular setting. The Mexican immigrant worker in New
York is a perfect example of the hero who has gone unnoticed. It is common for a Mexican worker in New York
to work very long hours in extreme conditions for low wages which are saved at great cost and sacrifice and
sent to families and communities in Mexico who rely on them to survive. The Mexican economy has quietly
become dependent on the money sent from workers in the United States. Conversely, the U.S. economy has quietly
become dependent on the labor of Mexican immigrants. Along with the depth of their sacrifice, it is the quietness
of this dependence which makes Mexican immigrant workers a subject of interest. The principal objective of
this series is to pay homage to these brave and determined men and women who somehow manage, without
the help of any supernatural power, to withstand extreme conditions of labor in order to help their families and
communities survive and prosper. This project consists of twenty color photographs of Latino immigrants dressed
in the costumes of popular American and Mexican superheroes. Each photo pictures the worker/superhero in their
work environment and is accompanied by a short text including the worker’s name, their hometown, the number
of years they have been working in New York, and the amount of money they send to their families each week.
Screening produced by Coïncidence.
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INAKI BONILLAS
Since the late 1990s, Iñaki Bonillas has established a deep relationship with photography in his work. With a regard for the aesthetics and the conceptual practices of the sixties and seventies, he has been gradually isolating the constituent elements of photography and connecting them with other procedures. In 2003 Bonillas introduced the vast photo archives of his grandfather, J. R.
Plaza, into his work. His work has been shown recently in various exhibitions such as Les enfants terribles, Colección / Fundación
Jumex, Mexico City; El mal de escritura, MACBA, Barcelona, and Little Theater of Gestures, Museum für Gegenwartskunst,
Basel, and Malmö Konsthall. Iñaki Bonillas is represented by ProjecteSD, Barcelona, Galerie Greta Meert, Brussels, and
Galería OMR, Mexico City. Next fall the exhibition Archivo J. R. Plaza will open at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona.
DOUBLE CHIAROSCURO
In 2003, Iñaki Bonillas let the vast photographic archive of his grandfather J. R. Plaza enter into his practice, as a
continuous source of meditations on photography that often turn to elements that seem a priori incompatible: on
the one hand a biographical narrative and on the other a quasi-scientific element of compilation. This time Bonillas
has chosen to work with a single image taken from the archive, with the idea of exploring the possibility, not only
of creating a new set of images (through juxtaposition, recontextualisation or any other way of reinterpretating the
original source), but of creating a whole new archive. More than the mere flexibility of images, the purpose then
is to show how images are capable of giving birth to distinct visual realms. The image at issue is a portrait of the
great-grandfather of the artist that shows the remains of an old grid, once traced with the aid of a pencil all over the
picture, with the intention of making a copy. This given partition allows the artist to work with 104 images instead
of just one: 104 elements that are not just fragments of a bigger image, but images in their own rights, ready to
be used as such. By renouncing the figurativeness of the photograph (the possibility of subject recognition), the
artist is able to search for different ways of displaying this new abstract archive. But the images at this point are
no longer photographic either (they have become indiscernible), so Bonillas can also work from this neutrality
and explore four different techniques and methods, including a 16 mm film and a meticulous graphite drawing.
It is important to mention that the original photograph has another peculiarity: it was taken in such a way that
a situation of double chiaroscuro takes place, because gradations of background and foreground light intersect.
This luminous phenomenon of crossed axes gives the artist the opportunity to work with a richness of grey tones.
Exhibition organised in collaboration with the ProjecteSD Gallery in Barcelona.
Exhibition venue: couvent Saint-Césaire.
FERNANDO MONTIEL KLINT
Born in Mexico in 1978. Lives and works in Mexico.
Fernando Montiel Klint studied photography in the Escuela Activa de Fotografía and Centro de la Imágen. His work is a part
of such collections as Guandong Museum of Art in Guangzhou, China; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chile; Nave K, Spain;
Museum of Modern Art of Aguascalientes, Mexico. His work has been exhibited in solo and group shows in museums worldwide, like the Palais des Beaux Arts, Belgium; Patagonia Museum, Argentina; Colegio de arquitectos, Murcia, Spain; Victoria &
Albert Museum in London; Santralistanbul, Istanbul Bilgi University in Turkey; El Palau de la Virreina, Barcelona; La Triennale
de Milano. He has received grants from Omnilife, I D Magazine, First Place at the XXII Young Art National Encounter Mexico
and received Honorable Mention in the XXXIII Young Art National Encounter Mexico and Finalist on Critical Mass E.U.A. Some
of the art fairs where his work has been are: Preview Berlin, Slick Paris, Scope Basel Switzerland, Maco Mexico, PhotoMiami,
MadridFoto and he is represented in Mexico by Emma Molina, Spain Galeria Fernando Pradilla, New York CTS gallery.
ACTS OF FAITH
The society we have ended up with atomises and isolates its members, the technology co-dependents we’ve become,
individualists and consumers engulfed by a near-unearthly quest for total pleasure in which we are ceasing to
recognise and know ourselves for what we intrinsically are. Interaction has been ousted by virtual simulation within
which introspection and the search for being, for the interior, free-souled ‘I’, are shrinking inexorably. What is the
exact meaning of ‘faith’ here? My focus is on exploration of the act of faith in contemporary life without reference
to religion. I recreate my mental liberation through mises en scène and actions that are caught by the camera;
actions in which, searching for introspection, I invent deceitful realities composed of absurd ambiences. Introspection
is also a path of light leading towards contemplation and individual liberation, towards moments of inspiration
during which, in a mental culmination, the infinite is disclosed to me like a revelation. That which has no end—that
which is of the essence—transcends this world; faith replaces logic, transforming itself into an eternal, circular act.
Fernando Montiel Klint
Prints by Dupon, Paris
Framing by Plasticollage, Paris.
Exhibition venue: cloître Saint-Trophime.
www.klintandphoto.com
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DOCUMENTS
THE MEXICAN SUITCASE : ROBERT CAPA, CHIM (DAVID SEYMOUR), GERDA TARO
The legendary ‘Mexican suitcase’ containing Robert Capa’s Spanish Civil War negatives, considered lost since 1939,
has recently been rediscovered and is exhibited here for the first time. The suitcase is in fact three small boxes
containing nearly 4,500 negatives, not only by Capa but also by his fellow photojournalists, all Jews in exile, Chim
(David Seymour) and Gerda Taro. These negatives span the course of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), through
Chim’s in-depth coverage in 1936-37, Taro’s intrepid documentation until her death in battle in July 1937, and
Capa’s incisive reportage until the last months of the conflict. Additionally, there are several rolls of film by Fred
Stein showing mainly portraits of Taro, which after her death became inextricably linked to images of the war itself.
Between 1936 and 1940, the negatives were passed from hand to hand for safekeeping, and ended up in Mexico City,
where they resurfaced in 2007. The Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936. In the broadest terms, the war was a military
coup, led by General Francisco Franco and instigated to overthrow the democratically elected government of the
Spanish Republic, a coalition of leftists and centrists. From its inception, the civil war aroused the passions of those
who saw Franco’s actions as the front line of a rising tide of fascism across Europe, as he received material support from
Germany and Italy. Many leftist intellectuals and artists were committed to the antifascist struggle, and they provided
vivid images and texts in support of the Republican cause for the international press. The Mexican suitcase negatives
constitute an extraordinary window onto the vast output of these three photographers during this period: portraits,
battle sequences, and the harrowing effects of the war on civilians. While some of this work was known through vintage
prints and reproductions, the Mexican suitcase negatives, seen here as enlarged modern contact sheets, show us for
the first time the order in which the images were shot, as well as images that have never been seen before. This material
not only provides a uniquely rich view of the Spanish Civil War, a conflict that changed the course of European history,
but also demonstrates how the work of three photojournalists laid the foundation for modern war photography.
Cynthia Young, curator of the exhibition.
First show of this exhibition after New York, organised by the International Center of Photography, New York. This exhibition and its catalogue were
made possible with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts, Frank and Mary Ann Arisman,
and Christian Keesee. Additional support was received from Sandy and Ellen Luger.
Enlargement by Dupon, Paris.
Exhibition produced with the support of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès.
Exhibition venue: Musée Départemental de l’Arles Antique.
CHIM (DAVID SEYMOUR)
Born in 1911 in Warsaw. Deceased in 1956 in Suez.
Chim was born Dawid Szymin (Warsaw, November 20, 1911–Suez, November 10, 1956) into an intellectual family of publishers
of Yiddish and Hebrew books. In 1933, after studying graphic arts in Leipzig, he turned to photography to support himself
while continuing his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. Soon he was recognized for his strong photographs of political events
of the Popular Front and became a regular contributor to the French Communist magazine Regards. Like Capa, he covered
the entirety of the Spanish Civil War. But unlike Capa and Taro, who sought to photograph on the front lines, Chim’s great
achievement is his focus on individuals outside of battle: from formal portraits of major figures to images of soldiers on
the home front and peasants laboring in small towns. He was attuned to the complicated politics of the war and imbued his
images with nuanced meaning. He is, with Robert Capa, one of the founding fathers of Magnum Photos agency, in 1947.
GERDA TARO
Born in 1910 in Stuttgart. Deceased in 1937 in Brunete, Spain.
Gerda Taro was one of the first recognised women photojournalists. Born Gerta Pohorylle in Stuttgart (August 1, 1910–Brunete,
Spain, July 26, 1937) and raised in Leipzig in a middle-class Jewish family, she fled to Paris in 1933. She soon met ‘André’
Friedmann and started photographing; in the spring of 1936, they reinvented themselves as Robert Capa and Gerda Taro. In
August 1936, Taro and Capa arrived in Spain as freelancers to document the Republican cause for the French press. She became
a pioneering photojournalist whose brief career consisted almost exclusively of dramatic photographs from the front lines of the
Spanish Civil War. Her later style is similar to Capa’s, but it differs in her interest in formal compositions and a level of intensity
in photographing morbid subjects. Taro worked alongside Capa and the two collaborated closely. While covering the crucial
Battle of Brunete, she was struck by a tank and died. Taro was the first female photographer to be killed while reporting on war.
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ROBERT CAPA
Born in 1913 in Budapest. Deceased in 1954 in Thai Binh, Indochina.
Robert Capa is one of the most well known photojournalists of the twentieth century. Born Endre Ernö Friedmann in a family of
Jewish tailors, he was forced to leave Hungary at the age of seventeen because of leftist student activities; he fled to Berlin, where
he enrolled at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik as a student of journalism. With no money, no profession, and little knowledge
of German, he turned to the camera as a means of earning a living. In 1933, he moved to Paris, where he met Chim, Stein, and
Taro. Quickly gaining a reputation for his photographs of the Spanish Civil War, his work was characterized as viscerally close to
the action, as had rarely been seen before. In roll after roll of film in the so-called Mexican suitcase, one can see Capa move with
his subjects, chasing the action, seeking to understand and experience events as his subjects do. In 1947, Robert Capa creates
the Magnum Photos agency with Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and Chim (David Seymour).
TRISHA ZIFF, THEMEXICAN SUITCASE (DOCUMENTARY)
Born in the UK. Lives and works in Mexico City.
Trisha Ziff began working as a political activist using photography and film in the North of Ireland, establishing Camerawork
Derry in 1982 during the British war of occupation. She returned to London in the mid-eighties to direct Network Photographers.
She then moved to Mexico City and focused on curatorial work. Her exhibitions have been seen at major international museums
including: Victoria & Albert Museum, London, International Center for Photography, New York, Centro de la Imagen, Mexico
City. She was involved in the production of a CD Rom (Voyager), I Photograph to Remember. Her work on Che Guevara was first
seen in Arles in 2004, and she went on to produce a major touring show and film, Chevolution. 2008. Earlier films she produced
and co-produced: Oaxacalifornia (Faction Films, 1995), My Mexican Shiva and 9 months 9 days (2009). She recently finished
her latest documentary La Maleta Mexicana (Mallerich Films and 212 BERLIN, 2010). Currently she is developing a new feature
documentary, PIRATE COPY, which looks at the politics and issues of piracy of film and images. She recently curated a major
show of Maya Goded, Las Olvidadas, for Arts Block, California, and is collaborating with Enrique Metinides on his retrospective.
Mexican Suitcase is the story of three boxes that disappeared in Paris in 1939 and were recovered in Mexico
City in 2007. These boxes contain over 4,200 photographic negatives taken during the Spanish Civil War by three
photographers, exiles from Hungary, Poland and Germany, who met in Paris and traveled to Spain to fight
fascism with their cameras. Robert Capa (23), David Seymour (Chim) (28) and Gerda Taro, who would die in Spain
while on assignment before her 27th birthday. Various theories of just how the negatives found their way into
a closet in Mexico City are explored and in the process shed light on Mexico’s extraordinary involvement in the
Spanish Civil War. This is a story of exile and freedom, loss and recovery. A story of contradictions: what one man
dismissed, another man searched for and a third man after hesitating, returned. It is a story of survival. Mexican
Suitcase reveals the content of these boxes and explores what their importance is for us today as much as it reveals
about our past. Mexican Suitcase examines Mexico’s unique support to the Spanish Republic and its welcoming
of tens of thousands of refugees, as told through the narrative of the suitcase. The film was shot on a Canon 5D
camera, a still camera, by cinematographer Claudio Rocha. Directed by Trisha Ziff, 212 BERLIN and produced by
Eamon O’Farrill (Mexico), the film was co-produced with Mallerich Films, Barcelona (Producers Paco Poch and
Victor Cavalier). The film will be released later in 2011. The film is 90 minutes in length, digital and shot in 35mm.
Gala screening, for the first time, on July 5, 2011 at the Théâtre Antique.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE PHOTOGRAPHS
For over thirty years, the weekly New York Times Magazine has shaped the possibilities of magazine photography,
through its commissioning and publishing of photographers’ work across the spectrum of the medium, from
photojournalism to fashion photography and portraiture. In this exhibition, long-time New York Times Magazine photo
editor Kathy Ryan provides a behind-the-scenes look at the collaborative, creative processes of the past fifteen years
that have made this magazine the leading venue for photographic storytelling within contemporary news media. The
exhibition is comprised of eleven individual modules, each of which focuses on a notable project or series of projects
that have been presented in the pages of the magazine. While by no means comprehensive, the projects featured in
the exhibition mirror the magazine’s eclecticism, presenting seminal examples of reportage, portraiture, as well as
fine art photography. Using visual materials drawn from different stages of the commissioning process—shot lists,
work prints and contact sheets, videos, tear sheets and framed prints—the magazine’s collaborative methodology is
revealed from initial idea to the published page, and, in some cases, its continuation beyond magazine publication,
for example when a subject that began as an assignment has become a part of a photographer’s ongoing work. The
exhibition includes an extensive series of blow-ups of selected tearsheets and covers from the last thirty-years of the
magazine.
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About Kathy Ryan, curator of the exhibition and editor-in-chief if the New York Times Magazine : under her leadership,
the magazine has won numerous awards from The Pictures of the Year competition, World Press Photo, The Society
of Publication Designers, and The Overseas Press Club. She was recognized as Canon Picture Editor of the Year in 1997
at the Visa Pour L’Image Festival in Perpignan and in 2003 was named Picture Editor of the Year by the Lucie Awards.
About Aperture : located in New York’s Chelsea art district—is a world-renowned non-profit publisher and exhibition
space dedicated to promoting photography in all its forms. Aperture was founded in 1952 by photographers
Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Barbara Morgan and Minor White; historian Beaumont Newhall; and writer/
curator Nancy Newhall, among others. These visionaries created a new quarterly periodical, Aperture magazine,
to foster both the development and the appreciation of the photographic medium and its practitioners. In
the 1960s, Aperture expanded to include the publication of books (over five hundred to date) that comprise
one of the most comprehensive and innovative libraries in the history of photography and art. Aperture’s
programs now include artist lectures and panel discussions, limited-edition photographs, and traveling
exhibitions that show at major museums and arts institutions in the United States and internationally.
Kathy Ryan et Lesley Martin, curators of the exhibition.
Exhibition produced with Les Rencontres d’Arles by the Aperture Foundation.
Prints by Picto (for the exhibition in the cloître Saint-Trophime).
Exhibition venue: église Sainte-Anne and cloître Saint-Trophime.
The last fifteen years have seen a real upheaval in photojournalism as a profession.The digitisation of both
photography and the circulation of images has ensured the supremacy of three big agencies—Reuters, Agence
France Presse and Associated Press—working with a network of some hundred correspondents around the
world. This process of relocation, combined with dumping at below-market prices, triggered the decline of the
agencies, notably those founded in France in the late 1960s—the most iconic being Gamma, Sygma and Sipa.
Quickly followed by drastic cuts to editorial budgets, the market shift was devastating for photographers and
for the agencies as subcontractors. Then came the Internet phenomenon, with amateur photographers only too
delighted to step in as reporters for a day. In this atmosphere of the end of a golden age we thought it might be
interesting to set up a dialogue between two agencies which, paradoxically, started in the 2000s: VII (pronounced
‘seven’) based in Brooklyn / New York and Tendance Floue from Montreuil in the Paris suburbs. Both have been
set up and self-managed by photographers and have chosen two very different approaches to their métier.
François Hébel, artistic director of the Rencontres d’Arles
In theory the VII agency and Tendance Floue are diametrically opposed. The former comprises a group of
recognised photojournalists covering topical events or global issues on assignment for leading magazines. VII
is a touchstone in this respect, with its photographers ‘at the cutting edge of the news’. The latter is made up
of individuals exploring the world via a highly atypical creative workshop. Tendance Floue involves a pooling
of energy in which the photographer takes a back seat to the group as a whole. Group experiences turned into
images in different ways come together as a utopian worldview. Tendance Floue sees itself ‘at the cutting edge
of the present’. This photographic one-night event to mark our respective anniversaries is not an attempt at a
‘best of’ or an underscoring of what might be considered our differences. On the contrary, we believe that our
explorations of different fields are driven by the same questionings. Our images exist primarily to challenge, to
examine the world via those crucial issues that lead us to a ‘political’ formulation of how we see things. While
a vital part of photography, this subjectivity exists not to prove a case, but rather to trigger thought or doubt.
VII et Tendance Floue
Screening at the Théâtre Antique, Wednesday 6 July produced by Coïncidence.
A TRIBUTE TO ROGER THÉROND
He was our father in photography, our mentor, our patron. He was the Eye of Paris Match, the founder of Photo, the passionate
collector. He shared with us his passion for the image. Roger Thérond died ten years ago. We are keen to pay homage to him
along with his family and friends. We will show the finest pages of Paris Match and the most extraordinary pieces from his
collection and present tributes from Edmonde Charles-Roux, Sylvie Aubenas, Didier Rapaud, Olivier Royant, Jean-Francois
Leroy, Philippe Garner and Sebastião Salgado.
Jean-Jacques Naudet
Roger Thérond, was born in 1924 in Sète. In 1945, he joined the Écran français as film critic, with the support of
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Jacques Prévert. Three years later, in 1948, he became a reporter at Samedi Soir just before signing up at Jean
Prouvost’s Paris-Match, in 1949, as its youngest-ever managing editor. He was editor in chief at Match in 1962
and left the magazine in 1968. He was invited by Françoise Giroud to join L’Express as consulting editor. With
Walter Carone and André Lacaze, he launched Photo magazine and joined Publications Filipacchi. In 1976, Daniel
Filipacchi acquired Paris-Match and appointed Roger Thérond as its director. In 1980 Thérond and Jean-Luc
Monterosso created the Grand Prix Paris Match for photojournalism, in the context of Paris’ Photography Month.
This prize is awarded by the weekly magazine every two years to a photojournalist working in daily news. Two years
later, Thérond was named vice-president and editorial director of the Hachette-Filipacchi Press Group. In 1989,
with Michel Decron, Jean Lelièvre and Jean-François Leroy, he founded Visa pour l’Image, the world’s largest
international photojournalism event. In 1996 he became president of the editorial committee of HachetteFilipacchi Media and a member of the board of Lagardère Group. He quit Paris Match in 1999, after a half century
in which he effectively ‘created’ the magazine, and marked the occasion by exhibiting, for the first time,
his collection of photographic images at the Maison Européenne de la Photo. One of the most beautiful
collections in the world, its images having the effect of turning contemporary events into an extraordinary
adventure. He was also a top collector of nineteenth-century photographs. He married Astrid Doutreleau,
an Arles native, in 1971, and had four children: Émilie, Éléonore, Ève and Tristan. From its very inception
he was a supporter of Rencontres d’Arles, and was a member of its governing council until his death.
This tribute has been organised by Jean-Jacques Naudet, Guillaume Clavières and Marc Brincourt.
Screening at the Théâtre Antique, Wednesday 6 July, produced by Coïncidence.
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POINTS OF VIEW
DISCOVERY AWARD
The Rencontres d’Arles Discovery Award goes to a photographer or an artist making use of photography, whose
work has recently been discovered internationally or deserves to be. The winner is chosen by a vote of photography
professionals present in Arles during opening week and receives 25,000 euros. The nominators are all new
executive directors of international institutions and each has chosen three nominees, whose work is exhibited.
With the support of the LUMA Foundation.
Exhibition venue: Grande Halle, Parc des Ateliers.
ARTISTS PRESENTED BY SIMON BAKER
Born in England in 1972. Lives and works in London.
Simon Baker is the first curator of photography and international art at Tate in London. Prior to joining Tate, he was associate
professor of art history at the University of Nottingham, where he taught history of photography, surrealism and contemporary
art. He has published widely and curated the following exhibitions: Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents
(Hayward, London, 2006); Close-up: proximity and defamiliarisation in art, film and photography (Fruitmarket, Edinburgh,
2008); and, most recently (with Sandra Phillips), brought Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera, to Tate Modern.
www.tate.org.uk/modern
MINORU HIRATA_Japan
Born in 1930 in Tokyo. Lives and works in Tokyo.
Minoru Hirata is perhaps best known for his brilliantly intense accounts of Japanese performance art—particularly the groups
Neo-dada, Hi-Red Center and Zero Dimension. However, his photographic record of performance art reveals a more complex and
sophisticated perspective than one would usually expect from straightforward documentation. As well as recording the activities
of the Japanese avant-gardes, Minoru Hirata was a committed photographer in his own right, his principal subject being the
island of Okinawa (occupied by the USA between 1945 and 1972). Minoru Hirata’s work, from the 1960s to the present day, is
as sensitive, engaged and original as his better-known performance practice: showing the same experimental confidence and
originality in relation to the politics of everyday life (under occupation), as he did to the spectacular world of the avant-garde.
Simon Baker
Minoru Hirata first came in contact with the Tokyo avant-garde in 1958, when he saw Ushio Shinohara’s
outrageous work at the jury-free Yomiuri Independent Exhibition held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum.
Soon afterward, in 1959 or 1960, Hirata visited Shinohara at his residence-studio in Tokyo on assignment
from an American photo agency. This shooting brought the two closer and Hirata began to avidly document
the performative activities of Shinohara, as well as a number of important practitioners of Anti-Art (Hangeijutsu), including Neo Dada, Hi Red Center, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, and Zero Jigen (literally ‘zero dimension’).
Action is the definitive ingredient of what Hirata chronicled. He calls himself the ‘conspirator’ of these artists
and collectives who staged their ‘art in action.’ Indeed, he created a body of significant art-historical documents
which also reveals a tremendous degree of photographic authenticity. Hirata’s long engagement with Okinawa
dates back to 1967, before the islands were returned to Japan from the U.S. in 1972. Upon his first visit, he
was immediately enthralled by the beauty of Okinawa’s coral reefs and seascapes. Yet what made a greater
impression was Okinawa’s complex geopolitical history. Since the end of WWII, valuable land resources
of the archipelago have been occupied, and are still occupied, by a host of American military bases.
His photographs are informed by his deep sympathy for the plight of the Okinawa people, whose dream
for independent existence still eludes them even after their land was returned to Japanese governance.
Reiko Tomii
www.takaishiigallery.com
Exhibition organised with the collaboration of the Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo.
MARK RUWEDEL_United-States
Born in 1954 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Lives and works in Long Beach, California.
Ruwedel makes work in the desert regions of the Western United States, much of which concerns the impacts of human activity on
the landscape. His work offers both an absolute commitment to the formal language and potential of the large-format camera, and
a deep commitment to the aesthetic potential of print-production. His work is as conceptually ambitious as it is geographically
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wide-ranging, drawing on the precision of the new-topographic tradition, but overlaying this approach with his own unique
perspective on the troubled relationship between the natural environment and the inevitable consequences of economic expansion.
Simon Baker
For many years now, my work has been concerned with offering an understanding of the American West as a
palimpsest of cultural and natural histories. Dusk and Dog Houses may best be described as chapters of a much
larger project entitled Message from the Exterior, while 1212 Palms is a complete work representing my long-term
interest in place names and a conceptual approach to landscape photography. 1212 Palms is a set of nine
black and white photographs of locations in the California deserts that were named for a certain number
of palm trees. From Una Palma to Thousand Palms Oasis, the nine names add up to one thousand two hundred
and twelve, although the number of trees depicted do not. The photographs in both Dusk and Dog Houses
were made in the desert regions east of Los Angeles. Dusk is a series of black and white images of abandoned
houses, photographed after the sun disappeared over the horizon. In their subdued, dark tones they suggest
both presence and absence, social as well as geographical isolation. The Dog Houses, photographed in color,
were found at deserted houses and homesteads similar to those of the series Dusk. The collection presents
an inventory of a particular, and poignant, form of vernacular architecture. These modest structures
are both humorous and tragic, alluding to the fragility of human endeavor in a harsh environment.
Mark Ruwedel
Exhibition produced with the collaboration of the Luisotti Gallery, Santa Monica.
_Lithuania
Born in 1983 in Palanga, Lithuania. Lives and works in London.
Serpytyte’s work examines issues of memory, trauma and loss, through the post-war and recent history of her native Lithuania,
using a sophisticated combination of archival research, sculpture and photography. Her project 1944-1991 is exemplary in
this regard, beginning with a series of photographs of sites of repression and violence, which then form the basis for her own
complex and nuanced negotiations and representations of these same places. Working within and between media, her work
nonetheless displays a great commitment to the specific histories and critical potential of the photographic medium.
Simon Baker
1944-1991
In 1944 a Cold War began, a war that was brutal, inhumane. A war that has now been almost forgotten. The
Western powers continued to consider the occupation of the Baltic and Eastern Countries by the Stalinist powers
to be illegal despite the post war conferences that had recognized the borders of the USSR. Hidden behind the
Iron Curtain, the occupation of the Soviet block continued for fifty years and destroyed the lives of millions. It
is estimated that there were at least 20 million deaths. Many believe that the real figure is closer to 60 million.
Despite not receiving any backing from the West, the partisans’ resistance fought against the Soviet regime.
These partisans had to abandon both their families and homes and seek sanctuary in the forests. In numerous
villages and towns, domestic dwellings were attained by KGB officers for use as control centers, interrogation,
imprisonment and torture. These homely spaces were converted into places of terror. As a result the forest not
only became the place of refuge but also the place of mass graves. The most active and forceful resistance came
from the Lithuanian ‘forest brothers’, which lasted for ten years.
www.indre-serpytyte.com
Framing by Circad, Paris.
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ARTISTS PRESENTED BY CHRIS BOOT
Born in 1960 in Shropshire, UK. Lives and works in New York.
Chris Boot is the executive director of the Aperture Foundation—a role he began in January 2011 after ten years of working as an
independent publisher. Under his own imprint, Chris Boot Ltd, he published over forty titles including History by Luc Delahaye
(2004), Lodz Ghetto Album: Photographs by Henryk Ross (2004), Things as They Are: Photojournalism in Context Since 1955
(2005), The Memory of Pablo Escobar by James Mollison (2007), Beaufort West by Mikhael Subotzky (2008) and Infidel by Tim
Hetherington (2010). From 1998 to 2000 Boot worked as editorial director of Phaidon Press, where he commissioned such titles
as Martin Parr’s Boring Postcards and The Photo Book—A History. Before that, Boot worked for Magnum Photos for eight years,
including as director of its London and New York offices. He is also the author and editor of Magnum Stories (Phaidon, 2004).
www.aperture.org
CHRISTOPHER CLARY_United-States
Born in 1968, Rochester, NY. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Christopher Clary made an installation for an exhibition called Gay Men Play that I put together for the New York Photo Festival
in 2009, about the use of photography by gay men as a tool for communicating about sex. The room he created, wallpapered
with images he collected and output from his hard drive, was smart and affecting. But his work is only partly about photographs
as social and sexual currency. In publicly exploring his desire for a particular photographic archetype of manhood, and the male
nude, Clary poignantly mines issues of sexual fiction, self-confidence and male vulnerability.
Chris Boot
Christopher Clary is a multidisciplinary installation artist who uses appropriated and his own photography to
confront issues of sexuality and masculinity. At the core of his practice is a collection of gay porn—magazines
that document the bear, leather and trucker communities over a twenty year period, and a digital collection
including 1,500 men downloaded from professional and amateur sex and social network websites. The collection
becomes the starting point for the creation of works that consider his own sexual and social identity, and the
production and consumption of images of male sexuality. Clary’s installation in Arles includes a presentation of
his porn photographs in a raw state; magazines on display and thumbnails printed on wallpaper. Within the space,
images of Kevin from the collection are blown up on canvas and stacked in groups—JPG windows manifested as
larger-than-life paintings. The installation also includes two series of photographs, involving Clary’s encounters
with men from his collection in real life: invited to slowly undress over a period of two hours in front of a camera
in his studio, Clary sets the camera to make photographs automatically every five seconds. As singular images,
the results seem similar to the photographs in the collection, but the series as a whole reveals and explores a
subtext to the ‘male nude’, with his encounters provoking and revealing expressions of vulnerability and pain as
well as sexual self-confidence and desire.
www.christopherclary.com
DAVID HORVITZ_United-States
Born in 1982 in Los Angeles. Lives and works in Brooklyn.
Although making photographs is a central part of David Horvitz’s work—whether made by him or by others whom he prompts—
they are the opposite of refined art objects. Rather, the pictures are like postcards, exchanges between him and his audience,
souvenirs of his interventions in the world, of getting his audience to think like conceptual or performance artists, and play. He
wants people to pay attention to their environment differently—a virtual land artist of the interactive age—and he leaves barely a
trace behind. His enquiry into the nature of photography reminds me of Duane Michals and Keith Arnatt.
Chris Boot
David Horvitz’s nomadic personality shifts seamlessly between the Internet and the printed page, avoiding any
particular definition or medium. Recurring interests across these disciplines include attention to strategies of
information circulation and the impermanence of digital artifacts. Horvitz frequently encourages participation
from both his friends and a web-based audience for his projects. He channels the spirit of conceptual artists
while reaching out to a community through digital communication technologies. Many of his projects are infused
with generosity and free distribution. For Public Access, a recent project, he traveled the entire California coast
from the Mexican to the Oregon border. Along his road-trip, he made photographs of various views of the Pacific
Ocean with his body (sometimes inconspicuously) standing within the frame. These photographs were then
uploaded to the Internet to illustrate the location’s Wikipedia listing. A photograph of Horvitz standing at the
Mexican-American border, with the wooden border going out into the ocean, was uploaded to the article for
Border Field State Park. With the intent to openly distribute the images within the new public spaces opened
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up by the Internet, the photographs caused a small controversy within the community of Wikipedia editors.
After lengthy debates emerged, the images were either edited (with Horvitz removed from his own photographs)
or deleted entirely. A PDF was made that includes documentation of the entire project and the process of the
images’ removal. For From the Southern-most Inhabited Island of Japan (Hateruma… Public Domain), which was
currently on view at the New Museum, Horvitz generated a string of ‘travelling’ images that was an online
metaphorical representation of a journey to South Japan where he had travelled a few years earlier. Like many of
Horvitz’s projects, the work took on various forms: text, photography, found imagery, newsprint take-aways, and a
book.
www.davidhorvitz.com
Prints by Janvier, Paris.
PENELOPE UMBRICO_United-States
Born in 1957 in Philadelphia. Lives and works in New York City.
Penelope Umbrico’s typologies of everyday descriptive photographs, made in their thousands and posted online, are detached
anthropological observations about people, things that matter to them, and their behaviour. At the same time, they are the art
of a scavenger, who finds photographs and groups and displays them in ways that are entirely personal to her. Like the others I
nominated for the Discovery Award, Umbrico makes provocative and original work, engaged with and about the phenomenon of
photography as it is now, a language used by almost all of us, to traffic social meaning online.
Chris Boot
SIGNAL TO INK
My work is as much a study of photography as it is photography. Searching through images on online communities,
I employ methods of re-photographing, scanning and screen-capturing to extract selected details from these images
that I feel point to a deflation or a rupture in the idealized representations I find there. Collecting and recontextualizing
this material, I become an archivist. The work is an accumulation that registers technological histories while
revealing formulations of desire and cultural longings. The idea of absence and erasure is a theme in my work,
especially with regard to popular uses of technologies such as photography and the Internet. I question the idea of
the democratization of media, where pre-scripted images, made with pre-set tools, claim to foster subjectivity and
individuality. I investigate the space between individual and collective photographic practices, and what it means
for individuals to take and share photographs with an anonymous public. Consisting of small details derived from
hundreds of images of objects for sale in various states of disrepair, my work for the Discovery Award explores the
aftermath and by-products of easy, expedient mass production and the availability of everything, through prevailing
user-friendly photographic technologies. I find: unwanted cumbersome CRT TVs as awkward in their photographic
frames as they are in their living-rooms; an abundance of universal remote controls—‘universal remote’ an apt
metaphor for contemporary conditions of detachment and isolation. A trajectory from images of objects that are
like unmanageable obstinate bodies, to images of objects that are abstract extensions of the body, the work tells a
kind narrative about the promise and failure of technology—a tour through technologies of image production with
a subtext of cultural manifestations of desire, materiality, immateriality, disembodiment, absence, and erasure.
Penelope Umbrico
www.penelopeumbrico.net
Framing by Plasticollage and Circad, Paris.
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ARTISTS PRESENTED BY LE POINT DU JOUR
DAVID BARRIET, DAVID BENASSAYAG & BÉATRICE DIDIER
Live and work in Cherbourg-Octeville and Paris.
In 1996, David Barriet, David Benassayag and Béatrice Didier started up Le Point du Jour, a publishing house specialising in
photography, then in 1999, the Regional Photographic Centre at Cherbourg-Octeville, which has organised more than sixty
exhibitions, projections, meetings and residencies. In 2008, they took over a building designed by Éric Lapierre (winner of a
prestigious architectural award) and since then it has flourished in its twin roles as art centre and publisher. There have been
exhibitions of Lynne Cohen, Mikaël Levin, Helen Levitt, Joachim Mogarra, Maxence Rifflet and Gilles Saussier. At the same time,
there have been regular activities for the public. Every two years, Le Point du Jour administers an ‘artist-in-residence’ project,
leading to an exhibition and a book, and the Prix Roland Barthes, an award for research in photography.
David Barriet was born in 1970 in the North of France. He has worked in journalism as a member of a photographic department
and as an independent photographer. Until 2002, he also worked on projects of his own, with exhibitions at Pôle Image HauteNormandie (Rouen) and at the Caen Arthothèque.
David Benassayag was born in 1970 in Paris. He studied literature at the Sorbonne University, before completing a master’s
degree in publishing at the University of Paris XIII. He has worked as an editor and as a publisher’s assistant.
Béatrice Didier was born in 1964 in Paris. She has worked as a journalist and as the manager of theatre and dance companies.
She holds a master’s degree in political science from the University of Grenoble-Stendhal.
www.lepointdujour.eu
LYNNE COHEN_Canada
Born in 1944 in the United States. Lives and works in Montreal, Canada.
Lynne Cohen’s images focus systematically on interiors without people, deploying a rigorous minimalism that contrasts often
with kitsch settings and sometimes with some incongruous detail or incomprehensible relationship between objects. The harder
you look, the more you feel a sneaking disquiet: firstly because of the physical constraints implicit in the places shown, and
then because of the images themselves, with their mixed intimations of equipment catalogues and art installations. These frontal,
imposingly framed shots always have a hidden secret: something utterly trivial or very serious seems camouflaged inside them,
just as the pictures themselves seem like camouflage—but of what intentions, and what realities?
David Barriet, David Benassayag, Béatrice Didier
For over thirty years Lynne Cohen has been photographing living rooms, men’s clubs, classrooms, bath-houses
and army bases. She could be a collector searching all these places for some unique item, but a collector with
little or no interest in origin or authenticity: Cohen prefers not to say where her photographs have been taken,
a tactic that heightens their factitious sameness. Yet once framed and on the wall, each of these sites lifted
out of the material world becomes the locus of a potential drama. Hung lower than usual, the images could be
windows we might accidentally pass through, like Alice and the mirror. The openings letting in artificial light,
the neon rectangles like opaque skylights, and the real or supposed reflections—all these contribute to this
overall impression of mise en abyme. In this world imagined by human beings, nothing is on a human scale:
what giant or dwarf could find its place in this weird room with a red thread running across a synthetic lawn?
Dummies, painted animals, a family of black submarines enjoying a stroll and a group of white armchairs taking
a break are among the few residents. The numbers, maps and screens are clear indicators of an underlying
surveillance or mercantile rationale, but this big brother element provokes no denunciation from Lynne Cohen: it
is through her wielding of black humour and incongruity that all the norms are at one little stroke slyly subverted.
www.lynne-cohen.com
Exhibition produced with the collaboration of the James Hyman Gallery in London, of the galerie In Situ / Fabienne Leclerc in Paris and of Le Point du Jour.
RUT BLEES LUXEMBURG_ Germany
Born in 1967 in Leimen, Germany. Lives and works in London.
Most of Rut Blees Luxemburg’s pictures are night views of enormous buildings and abandoned urban spaces. The city and
civilisation are laid bare in their infrastructures, in their nooks and crannies, as if we were backstage in a theatre.
No human figures are to be found here, but this is no icy report on today’s inhumanity, either: on the contrary
these images are imbued with some vital force, like fragments of dreams where intensely contrasting
sensations—fear and desire, madness and rationality—coalesce in an irresistible personal vision.
Rut Blees Luxemburg is presenting new images from her Black Sunrise series. Taken in New York in 2010,
these big, luminous photos echo Walt Whitman’s poetic panorama of the city and its multitude of desires.
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The works on show explore the darkest urban recesses. In the title image a black pipe is snaking towards a
huge globe of the world: a grandiloquent symbol of empire diminished by a dark sky in which we sense a
gleam of light. O offers the ‘come-on’ eye of an American actress, partly overlaid with a low-rent sexbusiness sticker: here all the appalling profanation of beauty and Eros is made visible in the flutter of an eyelash.
The Luxemburg oeuvre has its roots in the city’s public spaces. The artist lays bare the inner workings
of today’s ‘modern projects’, yet succeeds in endowing them with an incredible sensuality. Her work is an
attempt to show what we pay no attention to, what is not looked at, what we do not expect: and it plunges
us into these dizzying compositions that contrast and deconstruct accepted perceptions of the city.
www.rutbleesluxemburg.com
Exhibition produced in collaboration with the galerie Dominique Fiat, Paris.
Prints of some photographs by Picto, Paris.
Framing of some photographs by Circad, Paris.
JOACHIM MOGARRA_France
Born in 1954 in Tarragona, Spain. Lives and works in Montpeyroux, France.
Mogarra reinvents the world at home, photographing things he loves, cheap little bits and pieces he usually rounds off with a few
handwritten words. Each is part of a thematic whole, of a collection or narrative inspired by the artist’s life. Faced with the flagrant
discrepancy between the image and what it supposedly represents, and with these differences of scale and mixes of registers,
we burst out laughing; but maybe these seemingly innocuous pictures are unsettling for our ways of seeing and thinking, too.
Looking at Joachim Mogarra’s images, we can’t help thinking of the way kids, starting out with virtually nothing,
construct an invented world where anything goes. Here a china dog straightaway takes on the substance of a real
character; a kitchen funnel conjures up a black hole in some distant galaxy; four little towers turn a pomegranate
bought on the market into a magically Oriental mosque; a teenager holding a pair of handlebars becomes the hero
of a motorbike race. The Mogarra oeuvre is all about telling stories and inviting us to join in. Yet the obvious way
he overdoes—or underdoes—things means we can’t just settle for laughing at his jokes. Behind every illusion
another may be lurking. This DIY art strikes at travel to distant lands, scientific theories, aspects of civilisation
and people’s identities; but also at photography’s ability to depict the world via reporting, portraiture, astronomy
or architecture. This absurdist fun, though, seems primarily intended for personal use: just what’s needed to cut
the different facets of the human comedy down to private theatre and so more or less domesticate the world.
Maybe only photography lends itself to this kind of delightful transposition. At all events, it allows the expression
of contradictory feelings and discrepant tastes. Seen in this light the Mogarra oeuvre is a paradoxical self-portrait,
no sooner seen than it slips away.
Exhibition produced in collaboration with the galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, Paris.
Framing by Plasticollage and Circad, Paris (for The Wonder of Photography).
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ARTISTS PRESENTED BY SAM STOURDZÉ
Born in 1974 in Paris. Lives and works in Lausanne.
Sam Stourdzé, a specialist in images, was appointed director of the Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne in 2009. His research hinges on
the context of their production, distribution and reception. For a number of years, he has been studying the mechanisms at work
in the circulation of images, with a predilection for the relationships between photography, art and the cinema. He has organised
many exhibitions and published several books, amongst which: Le Cliché-Verre de Corot à Man Ray in 1997, retrospectives of
works by Dorothea Lange and Tina Modotti, Chaplin et les images in 2006, and Fellini: La Grande parade in 2009.
www.elysee.ch
JEAN-LUC CRAMATTE & JACOB NZUDIE_Switzerland and Cameroon
Live and work in Fribourg in Switzerland and in Yaoundé in Cameroon.
When Cramatte met Nzudie, the Yaoundé supermarket photographer, he was struck by the impact of a very ordinary activity.
Their project gave rise to an attempt to account for a commercial activity with manifold ramifications. The photographer’s
improbable studio was the aisles of the supermarket—for the important reason that it is a place of key social issues. The
Yaoundé supermarket clearly sees itself as a place for people who have made it socially. Nzudie’s clients choose their favourite
shelves carefully as a gauge of their success—their accession to the ranks of the consumer society. Proof of their status
is the studied gaze of the photographer selling portraits—photographs whose repeated nature only increases the desire to
appear in them; photographs which, because there are so many of them, add up to a vast sociological portrait. The infinite
succession of portraits by Nzudie that Cramatte has chosen works the notion of a series dry. And when all artifice is down, it
is photography itself which is on show. The alternative story it tells is that of a poor image in the shadow of a concrete jungle.
Sam Stourdzé
SUPERMARKET
Jacob Nzudie photographs his clients in a supermarket in Cameroon just the way they want to be seen. The setting
is significant; it is a supermarket for privileged customers, often Western expatriates, and not used by most
Cameroonians. It is used by some, however, as a kind of dream machine. They imagine themselves as well-off,
‘sophisticated locals’, who can ignore the open-air markets with their lack of hygiene and exclusively local
produce and the need to rub shoulders with their poorer compatriots. The supermarket feeds these people’s
fantasies. Even though it was economic and professional necessity that led Nzudie to make the shop his studio,
his photographic work has an underlying sense to it insofar as it exposes his compatriots’ ambiguous
attitudes towards urbanity and the desire for social advancement in this extremely hierarchical society. Nzudie
and Jean-Luc Cramatte met in Yaoundé in 2006. At the time Cramatte was working on a heritage project in
the Bastos district; he was interested in the output of street photographers. There are hundreds of them in
Yaoundé doing whatever customers ask forportraits, of course, but it might be to reproduce old photographs
(there and then on the pavement), or pictures of life in the big-city cabarets, weddings or birthdays. Cramatte
collects, sorts and reworks the unsold photos, adding colour or collages. Overheard remarks Cramatte
has noted: ‘The photograph gets thrown away, it disappears the same day.’ ‘We make photo-taxis, we never
know where they’re going to end up.’ ‘We’re the photographers of frivolity.’ This series, which is disturbing
in its unrelenting fascination with works that have no future, echoes Cramatte’s other series in Poste mon amour
(My Beloved Post-office), Lars Müller Publisher, 2008 and Bredzon Forever (Idpure, 2010).
www.cramatte.com
Exhibition produced with the support of the Canton of Fribourg, Switzerland and of the musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne.
Framing by Plasticollage, Paris and l’Atelier Émilie, Arles.
RAPHAËL DALLAPORTA_France
Born in 1980 in France. Lives and works in Paris.
With every successive project, Raphaël Dallaporta restates his photographic creed. Antipersonnel was like a sales catalogue,
glorifying mines from the neutrality of his studio in a military base. Domestic Slavery used a taut documentary strategy to
treat the issue of slavery. On the right, the photographs, repetitive, impenetrable, the facade of the scene of the event; on
the left, the text tells the story. Raphaël Dallaporta’s latest work took him to Afghanistan alongside a team of archaeologists
working on an inventory of Afghan heritage. The photographer has been helping them map the sites. There have been many
attempts at aerial photography since the nineteenth century. Nadar went up in a hot-air balloon. Dallaporta has built his own
flying machine equipped with cameras. Using this technology, the photographer continues the photographic reflection of his
predecessors. The shooting process is automated and the areas photographed are reconstructed by means of a powerful imagerecognition algorithm. Dallaporta’s inquiring camera sees ruins as layers pushing back the remains of history. There is the
ruin disarranged by modern conflicts; the ruin as scarified landscape accumulating the marks of time. The ruin of the future.
Sam Stourdzé
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RUINS (SEASON 1)
The first photographs of Raphaël Dallaporta’s project Ruins (season 1), which he began in 2010, are presented
exclusively for the Rencontres d’Arles Discovery Award. Raphaël Dallaporta has worked with bomb-disposal units,
lawyers, journalists and forensic doctors. Since last autumn, he has been working with a team of archaeologists
from the north of Afghanistan. Using an aerial camera system—a special drone adapted by Dallaporta for the
project—he has been able to fly over Afghanistan taking pictures of the sites. The purpose of it all is to compile
an inventory of Afghan national heritage; it is hard to get to and in danger of destruction. Quite apart from
natural phenomena, the sites and monuments are primarily endangered by human actions such as pillage,
dynamiting or the location of military zones on rich archaeological terrains. The artist’s images place the country’s
current situation within a historic tradition. As a result of repeated invasions, this coveted territory retains the
imprint of the various civilisations that have occupied it. Fully appreciating the urgency of saving this heritage,
Raphaël Dallaporta has brought all his technical know-how to the task. The figure of the ruin at the centre of his
compositions indicates various signs of destruction in the remains. It breaks with the symmetry of the rectangle,
causing the photographic constructions to gain in emotive power what they seem to lose in formal perfection—
which reflects the state of these deteriorating remains. The forms are obtained, from several shots taken on the
same flight, through calculations made with automatic reconstruction and image-recognition software. Reality
is recreated from these shots by lining up different isometric projections. Like photography, ruins have a special
relationship with time: they are the evidence of a time which no longer exists. The project presents a process of
deterioration suspended in time. The ruin, which is the project’s raison d’être, affects us and reassures us about
human precariousness.
www.raphaeldallaporta.com
YANN GROSS_ Switzerland
Born in 1981 in Switzerland. Lives and works in Switzerland.
When Yann Gross has a yen to travel, he fixes a trailer to his moped, packs his things and sets off down the Valley of the Rhône.
There, surrounded by mountains, a traditionally secular people has farmed and forced a living out of the land. It’s hard to imagine
that on this land, some of them, having rejected the idea of ‘here’ have sought for themselves an ‘elsewhere’—an ‘elsewhere’ that
is right here. The America they have created in cunning disguise, ‘here’, is the America of the pioneers, the conquerors of the land.
And Yann Gross’s journey plays on all the ambiguities. It is constructed as a documentary leap into an imaginary community of
people drawn together by an apparent certainty about their identity—an identity that is strengthened by the fact that it is local.
Welcome to Horizonville.
Sam Stourdzé
HORIZONVILLE
David Lynch’s film The Straight Story, which is based on a true story, recounts the odyssey of Alvin Straight, a
retiree who drives hundreds of miles on a lawn-mower to visit his dying brother. It takes him about six weeks to
get there, the time he needs for a philosophical meditation on the subtleties that shape his journey. In this, as it
were, parody of the road-movie genre, Lynch paints a very human portrait of eccentric trajectories, somewhere on
the outskirts of the American dream. Far from the desolate spaces of Iowa and Wisconsin, Gross was inspired by
Lynch’s paean to slowness to explore the Valley of the Rhône and thereabouts. With his camera equipment and a
small tent stowed in a little trailer towed by a moped, he had the independence and mobility he needed to follow
the rhythms of the valley. Eschewing the fast main roads, he made a virtue of taking things slowly. This patient
style of exploration brought him into contact with marginal life-styles and gave him the opportunity to observe
those elusive details that escape the hurried glance. Horizonville, then, is a meticulous photographic investigation
with continual changes of scale. It hovers subtly between fiction and documentary, enabling us to question the
ways in which we usually pass through any given environment, how we perceive it and give meaning to it. This
out-of-sync road-movie also raises questions about the symbolic re-appropriation of a geographical site, the
creation of an imaginary community, and, perhaps, a new take on the hackneyed codes of a particular genre of
movie. As in The Straight Story, this modest ‘art of the fugue’ proves to be an effective means of tracing forms of
exoticism that are hidden by the very localness of those communities. Horizonville is nowhere. It is a compression
of time and space, a mythic horizon, an exotic vision of America in which dreams and gaze converge with impunity.
Through his choice of models and his discreet arrangement of the settings, Gross enters into a kind of partnership
with these people, increasing the charge of glamour that feeds their collective fantasy. He draws particularly
on codes which belong at times to the aesthetics of the cinema; at other times to documentary photography.
Joël Vacheron
www.yanngross.com
Prints by Photorotation, Geneva.
Framing by Plasticollage and Jean-Pierre Gapihan, Paris.
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ARTISTS PRESENTED PAR ARTUR WALTHER
Born in Ulm, Germany. Lives and works in New York City.
In June 2010, Artur Walther opened his collection to the public, a four-building museum complex set in the residential streets
of his hometown, Neu-Ulm / Berlafingen in southern Germany. He has been devoted to supporting global photography programs
and scholarships for nearly twenty years. He began collecting in the late 1990s, focusing at first on modern German photography
—including Bernd and Hilla Becher and August Sander—before expanding his collection to encompass contemporary
photography and video from artists around the globe. The collection today includes the most significant body of contemporary
Asian and African photography in the world. In New York City, Artur Walther now serves on a number of photography
committees at cultural and educational institutions, including MoMA’s Architecture and Design Committee. He is a
board member at the Storefront for Art and Architecture and at the International Center of Photography.
www.walthercollection.com
DOMINGO MILELLA_Italy
Born in 1981 in Bari, Italy. Lives and works between Bari and New York.
Milella’s photography shows us the physiognomy of a landscape as determined by its physical, anthropological, biological
and ethnic characteristics resulting out of the constant action and interaction between nature and mankind. There is a layering
of themes and periods, of structures and relics, of nature and manufactured, of the urban and the rural, of beauty and decay, of
intimacy and distance, of modernity and antiquity, of the present and of the passage of time.
Artur Walther
My intention for the Discovery Award 2011 in Arles is to show a selection of the most concise and evocative images
of my body of work. I have been photographing landscapes, human as well as natural, for ten years now. On this
occasion I would like to show a selection of the most important images of this decade. A concept, a skeleton,
a chronology of the themes, subjects and layers that constitute my vision and quest. I would like to create a simple
index that shows the consistency and wideness of my project. I would like to be able to compress this idea in
thirty small photographs and a couple of very large works. I would like to show a horizon of small images that
connect my whole body of work: from city views of Italy, Mexico City, Ankara and Cairo, as far as marginal and
natural views of Sicily, Tunisia, Albania and Turkey. What is contemporary about these places? What history and
memory do they hold? Identity, memory and history are the roots of these landscapes and the core of my visions.
For me, it’s a great privilege to photograph landscapes, it’s a possibility to enrich my sense of orientation in the
middle of such a confused and fast contemporary age. I trust the language of things, nature and architecture. I
feel the need of an alternative imagery, looking for a sense of identity, a culture that is modern and old at the same
time. A vision that should be easy to share with others.
Domingo Milella
www.brancolinigrimaldi.com
Exhibition produced in collaboration with the Brancolini Grimaldi Arte Contemporanea Gallery, London / Rome.
JO RACTLIFFE_South Africa
Born in 1961 in Cape Town. Lives and works in Johannesburg.
Ractliffe’s photography is deeply rooted in landscape and its association with spaces that hold the memory of violence and loss.
Her landscapes document that which is generally not noticed or accounted for; traces of a past no longer visible, it has to be
imagined and is contingent on the viewer’s eye. Her images are mysterious, mythical and transcend the immediate appearance
of everyday things.
Artur Walther
NO FINAL DA GUERRA (At the end of the war)
There are many myths about the war in Angola—one of the most complex and protracted ever fought in Africa.
Alongside its local ‘raisons d’être’, the war in Angola also unfolded as a proxy Cold War, mobilised by external
interferences, secret partnerships and undeclared political and economic agendas, manifesting in various
deceptions, from the violation of international agreements to illegal operations, secret funding and the provision of
arms. It was a war of subterfuge; a fiction woven of half-truths and cover-ups. I first read about Angola in Another
Day of Life, Ryszard Kapuscinski’s book about events leading to Angola’s independence and subsequent civil war.
This was during the mid-eighties, a time when South Africa was experiencing increasing mobilisation against the
forces of the apartheid government, which was also fighting a war in Angola. Until then, in my imagination, Angola
had been an abstract place. In the 1970s and early 1980s, it was simply ‘The Border’, a secret location where brothers
and boyfriends were sent as part of their military service. And although tales about Russians and Cubans and the
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Cold War began to emerge, it remained, for me, a place of myth. In 2007 I went to Luanda for the first time. Five
years had passed since the war had ended and I was interested in exploring the social and spatial demographics of
the city in the aftermath. During my time there, a second project began to suggest itself—one that would shift my
attention away from the urban manifestation of aftermath to the ‘space’ of war itself. Photographically, these works
explore how past trauma manifests itself in the landscape of the present—both forensically and symbolically. We
live in a present space, but one that—as Jill Bennett notes in A Concept of Prepossession—‘bears the marks
(indelible and ephemeral) of its history. And as much as we occupy places, they have the capacity to pre-occupy us.’
Jo Ractliffe
www.stevenson.info
Exhibition produced with the collaboration of the Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa.
MIKHAEL SUBOTZKY_South Africa
Born in 1981 in Cape Town, South Africa. Lives and works in Johannesburg.
His photography is a study of social and economic dynamics, of a culture of fear and security, of power and of marginalised
citizenry, a complex civic portrait. In this inquiry his engagement with his subjects is intimate and direct, yet unobstrusive,
connected, empathetic. There is precision, complexity, diligence, a thoroughness and an intensity in pursuit of ideas and concepts.
Artur Walther
PONTE CITY
The fifty-four-storey building dominates Johannesburg’s skyline, its huge blinking advertising crown visible from
Soweto in the south to Sandton in the north. When it was built in 1976—the year of the Soweto uprisings—the
surroundings were exclusively white, and home to young middle-class couples, students and Jewish grandmothers. But as the city changed in response to the arrival of democracy in 1994, many residents joined the
exodus towards the supposed safety of the northern suburbs, the vacated areas becoming associated with crime,
urban decay and, most of all, the influx of foreign nationals from neighbouring African countries. Ponte’s iconic
structure soon became a symbol of the downturn in central Johannesburg. Tales of brazen crack and prostitution
rings operating from its car parks, four storeys of trash accumulating in its open core, frequent suicides have all
added to the building’s legend. And yet, one is left with the feeling that even the building’s notoriety is somewhat
exaggerated. In 2007 the building was bought by developers but by late 2008 their ambitious attempt to refurbish
Ponte had failed spectacularly. They went bankrupt after promising to spend thirty million euros for the building.
Their aim was to target a new generation of aspirant middle-class residents, young and upwardly
mobile black professionals. The developer’s website still describes how ‘In every major city in the world, there is
a building where most can only dream to live. These buildings are desirable because they are unique, luxurious,
iconic. They require neither introduction nor explanation. The address says it all.’ Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick
Waterhouse have been working on Ponte City since early 2008. Their project encompasses a wide variety of
sources and media including photographs, found documents, interviews, and texts. During these years they took
photographs of every window in the building, of every internal door, and of every television screen.
Mikhael Subotzky
www.subotzkystudio.com
Project in collaboration with Patrick Waterhouse.
Loan from a private collection.
Framing of some images by Plasticollage, Paris.
Exhibition produced with the collaboration of Goodmann Gallery, Le Cap / Johannesburg.
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BOOK AWARDS
The Author Book Award of 8,000 euros goes to the best photography book published between 1 of June 2010
and 31 May 2011.
The Historical Book Award of 8,000 euros goes to the best thematic book or monograph published between 1
June 2010 and 31 May 2011.
The Book Award winners are chosen by the five Discovery Award nominators, Rencontres d’Arles president JeanNoël Jeanneney, and LUMA Foundation president, Maja Hoffmann.
500 books published during the year are sent by the publishers. One copy is received by the École Nationale
Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles and the other is exhibited in the festival. Afterwards, it is offered to a foreign
institution with limited resources (Three Shadows in Beijing, 2010; Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers Multimédia
Balla Fasseké Kouyaté of Bamako, 2011).
10 YEARS OF THE RENCONTRES D’ARLES AWARDS
Initiated by the Rencontres d’Arles in 2002, and immediately backed by the LUMA Foundation, the Discovery
Award has since led to the invitation of more than fifty guest nominators, whose widely varying choices illustrate
the ongoing expansion of the field of photography. Many of the winning artists were on the rise at the time; and as
this exhibition conclusively shows, all of them have gone on to find real reputations. The laureates, since 2002, are:
2002 - Discovery Award: Peter Granser nominated by Manfred Heiting, the No Limit Award: Jacqueline Hassink
nominated by Erik Kessels, the Outreach Award: Tom Wood nominated by Manfred Heiting, the Photographer
of the Year Award: Roger Ballen nominated by Manfred Heiting and Val Williams, the Project Assistance Grant:
Chris Shaw (no nominator), Pascal Aimar (no nominator).
2003 - Discovery Award: Ziyah Gafic nominated by Giovanna Calvenzi, the No Limit Award: Thomas Demand
nominated by Christine Macel, the Outreach Award: Fazal Sheikh nominated by Urs Stahel, the Photographer of
the Year Award: Anders Petersen nominated by Urs Stahel, the Project Assistance Grant: Jitka Hanzlova
nominated by Urs Stahel.
2004 - Discovery Award: Yasu Suzuka nominated by Eikoh Hosoe, the No Limit Award: Jonathan de Villiers
nominated by Elaine Constantine, the Outreach Award: Edward Burtynsky nominated by Tod Papageorge, the
Project Assistance Grant: John Stathatos nominated by Joan Fontcuberta.
2005 - Discovery Award: Miroslav Tichy nominated by Marta Gili, the No Limit Award: Mathieu Bernard-Reymond
nominated by Marta Gili, the Outreach Award: Simon Norfolk nominated by Kathy Ryan, the Project
Assistance Grant: Anna Malagrida nominated by Marta Gili.
2006 - Discovery Award: Alessandra Sanguinetti nominated by Yto Barrada, prix No Limit : Randa Mirza nominated
by Abdoulaye Konaté, the Outreach Award: Wang Qingsong nominated by Vincent Lavoie, the Project
Assistance Grant: Walid Raad nominated by Vincent Lavoie.
2007 - Discovery Award: Laura Henno nominated by Alain Fleischer.
2008 - Discovery Award: Pieter Hugo nominated by Elisabeth Biondi.
2009 - Discovery Award: Rimaldas Viksraitis nominated by Martin Parr.
2010 - Discovery Award: Taryn Simon nominated by Hans Ulrich Obrist & Philippe Parreno.
The LUMA Award : Trisha Donnelly.
Screening by Coïncidence.
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EDUCATION
ÉCOLE NATIONALE SUPÉRIEURE DE LA PHOTOGRAPHIE D’ARLES
AN UNUSUAL ATTENTION, CLASS OF 2011
Here we find the developing work of three young artists, Oscar Dumas, Julie Fisher and Pierre Toussaint, offering
to audiences extraordinary stories, all of which have in common, by unsheathing an artist’s sensibility, the will to
go beyond the obvious. The work of Oscar Dumas evokes ‘tourist scenes’. Not for him a reportage on stereotypical
touristic anecdotes; rather, he uses tourist situations as if they were paroxysmic representations of our link to
reality, as mediated by the image, thus altering our representational system and aesthetizing our view of the world.
The idea is to see the real as one sphere of the symbolic realm, the signs of which form signifying structures
that lead onward to other images. Julie Fisher’s Les passeurs (Passers by) explores the sudden appearance and
disappearance of living beings in the heart of strange, inhospitable environments such as a freezing desert. For her,
photography stems from a desire to look the world in the eye so closely that traces of the unformed, the unsayable,
are perceptible to the sense of touch. The Metronome series of Pierre Toussaint is made up of instantaneous
encounters between bodies and a camera in a city environment. The act is planned but gives way to chance, which
regulates the encounter in its own way. The element of surprise comes from the formal, primitive communication
between body and urban texture. Here one finds expressive fragments of human nature—anonymous, rooted—
on their way to becoming ‘authentic visual events’. Just before receiving their diplomas, these three students were
selected by a jury consisting of François Hébel, director of Rencontres d’Arles, Géraldine Lay, photographer and
production director at Éditions Actes Sud, and Bertrand Mazeirat, manager of the Domaine du Château d’Avignon.
www.enp-arles.com
Exhibition venue: église Saint-Blaise.
ELLIPSE
The ellipse, or ellipsis, is a stylistic symbol that consists of omitting one or several elements theoretically
necessary for understanding; it thus obliges the reader to reintroduce mentally what the author subtracts. When
art becomes discourse, the works of Sophie Ristelhueber and Willie Doherty find their place in the semantic
form of the ellipse, they co-opt its strategy of invisibility, absence, silence, offering as they do more to reflection
than to vision. Sophie Ristelhueber’s work constitutes a meditation on territory and its history, through a unique
perspective on ruins and other traces left by man on places saturated by war. In her first book, Beyrouth,
photographies (1984), Ristelhueber shows us in wounded things the physical traces of a conflict: buildings
that have been collapsed, crushed, pockmarked with bullet holes; her images alternate between splendour and
decadence. The Fact series alternates aerial and ground-level views of the Kuwaiti desert, all completely free of
reference points or scale. The artist arrived in Kuwait in October 1991, seven months after the end of the first
Gulf War. She shot pictures of damage the traces of which would soon be swept away by the wind. As in Beirut,
it’s through the oppressive absence of life that she paradoxically affirms its presence. Dead Set (2001) uncovers
vestiges of Roman colonnades and deserted public housing in Syria. This series shows life arrested, unfinished,
as modern construction sites taken over by silence meld with antique columns: in Rainer Michael Mason’s text
for Sophie Ristelhueber’s book Opérations (Éditions Les presses du réel, 2009), she said, ‘I photograph real
things that are already gone’. Willie Doherty builds emblematic images linked to current events, specifically
terrorism in Northern Ireland. The artist assembles all his work around the linchpin of conflict and the modalities
of interpretation thereof, using photographs, video, and audiovisual presentations. In his work he searches
for the deserted places, the sites showing spoor, areas expressing a loss of identity, an absence of the other.
Everywhere he finds signs great or small of past violence, which the photographic images record, thus assuming
the obligations of memory. The tools of distancing that he employs—for example, the confrontation between text
and image—both destroy and imitate reporting techniques and the clichés of social realism. How can one bear
witness and create art without ever referencing current events? These two talented artists ask questions and
provide answers, each in his and her own way, regarding the strained dialectic that exists between art and politics.
Exhibition produced by the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie with the FRAC Alsace, FRAC Lorraine, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, and FRAC
Basse-Normandie collections.
Exhibition venue: Galerie Aréna
AUGUSTIN REBETEZ, LAUREATE OF THE PHOTO FOLIO REVIEW 2010
Born in 1986 in Switzerland. Lives and works in Mervelier, Jura.
School in Vevey. His work on the world of parties, Gueules de Bois (Hangovers) attracted attention and was exhibited simultaneously at the Vienna Photoforum and the musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland. The musée de l’Elysée also selected it
for their project ‘Regeneration2’, which involved an international tour (Milan, Paris, New York, Beijing). 2010 was a busy year
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for exhibitions and, at the Rencontres d’Arles, Rebetez was also laureate of the Photo Folio Review. This year, Augustin Rebetez’s
work is on display at the Mois de la Photographie, Montreal, at the Aarau Kunsthaus (Switzerland) and at the Rencontres d’Arles.
He remains close to his roots, still lives in the village of his birth in the Swiss Jura and works close to his childhood home, where
he has begun a small revolution against cynicism, indifference and neglect. Image by image, he is slowly creating strange music.
Augustin Rebetez lays claim to his own special universe, no less. A mysterious, sometimes bitter world where images
confront one another side by side on staggering wall installations. The work is a buzz with constant interaction—total,
discordant, astonishing. And yet there is a manifest and all-pervading harmony. Rebetez has that sense of freedom that
goes with the enthusiasm of youth but it is matched with great discipline of execution. With nary a flinch, he is capable
of mixing straight documentary images with the occasional grandiose production. He will even make Scotch tape masks
and ornaments in order to encase his models in his own emotional reality. The work of this 2010 Portfolio Review prizewinner displays a spontaneity and an obviousness in the act of creation that is rare in our regions, where art tends to be
muzzled by the various theories and schools. His work has a power that touches on the energy of art in its raw state. For
this exhibition, he has grouped together photos from already existing series. First, Hangovers, 2009 adds up to a portrait
of ends of parties in the Jura—a direct and intimate look at the implacable solitude and aggressiveness of the early hours
of the morning. Second, Tout ce qui a le visage de la colère et n’élève pas la voix (Everything that Looks angry but and
doesn’t raise its voice, 2010), is a kind of essay about rebellion, where the silent clamour of anger and powerlessness is
in every image. Finally, Blue Devils (2010) and After Dark (2011). The latter is a series shot in the solitude of a Norwegian
chalet and blends mystic staging with portraits of terrifying realism: a sense of the back of beyond, the essence of
humanity—where cries exist side-by-side with grace, and strange creatures loom up without warning. To this collection of recent work, Rebetez has added stop-motion videos. Here one enters the acerbic, out-of-phase universe of
a savage sense of humour which, like a body overwhelmed with tears, shakes all our preconceived ideas about art.
www.augustinrebetez.com
Exhibition produced with the support of the Fnac, the République and the Canton du Jura.
Exhibition venue: salle Henri Comte.
CLICKS AND CLASSES
THERE, I SEE US !
Clicks and Classes is a nationwide programme aimed at increasing young people’s awareness of photography.
Now in its eighth consecutive year, it is organised by the SCÉRÉN [CNDP-CRDP], a resources and publications
service of the French Ministry of Education. Along with the Ministry, several public and private sponsors, including
HSBC, Mexico and Nouvelle Calédonie are also associated with this project. Inspired by the theme ‘Portrait to
class photo’, schools have been setting up projects in which pupils work alongside artists. From kindergarten
to higher education, pupils spend several weeks working with a photographer or an artist working in another
medium. Their task is to analyse and re-think the traditional class photograph, that obligatory feature of school
since the invention of photography. Involving visual artists in the process helps pupils come to terms in an artistic
way with the school environment. It is a truly innovative experiment that also provides a wonderful opportunity
for them to get to know an artist and to gain a better understanding of all that is involved in portraiture. Over the
last seven years, 6,000 pupils have been guided by 150 photographers to set up artistic projects, exhibited each
year in Arles. In the 2011 Rencontres d’Arles, the spotlight will be on a selection of projects that have come out
of this excellent campaign since its inception and on the work that has been done thanks to our three partners.
Photographers who participated in the project: Pascal Aimar, Olivier Billon, Ragnar Chacín et Guillaume Corpart
Muller, Clark et Pougnaud, Antoine de Givenchy, Geoffrey Defachelles, Bertrand Desprez, Didier Devos, Rémi
Guerrin, María Antonieta Heredia López, Stéphanie Lacombe, Anne Lallemand, Yann Linsart, Émile Loreaux, Lucie
et Simon, Gaëlle Magder, Frédérique Massabuau, Emmanuelle Murbach, Matthias Olmeta, Nicolas Pinier, Laurence Reynaert, Yves Rouillard, David Samblanet, Éric Sinatora, Patrice Thomas, Isabelle Vaillant, Aurore Valade.
Exhibition produced with the support of HSBC France.
Exhibition venue: palais de Luppé.
IMPRISONMENT SEEN FROM THE INSIDE
WORKSHOPS IN THE PENITENTIAL OF ARLES
These photographs are an excellent illustration of the resources people can reveal in situations of severe stress. This is a call for our attention
from men deprived of their freedom, men who have a message for us, with educator-photographers Marco Ambrosi and Michel Gasarian
acting as intermediaries. Working in black and white and colour respectively, they offered two different approaches aimed at giving the participants the chance to express themselves by taking photographs and then reworking them with image-processing software. This is why, in
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addition to an exhibition in the penitentiary in Arles, it seemed a good idea to incorporate the results into the Rencontres. These photographs
are the outcome of a project undertaken with prison inmates in the prison in Arles. The project was part of a broader educational programme
suggested by the prison administration and organised by the community association PREFACE Léo Lagrange, a partner of
the GAÏA group.
A LIFE IN BLACK AND WHITE, A WORKSHOP BY MARCO AMBROSI
Apart from the fact of being a photographer, what led me to take on this project was its humanist side. My personal
contribution to social change involves photography and I dare to consider myself an ‘art sharing agent’. Well before I knew
that these images would be shown at the Rencontres, I challenged the participants with a question: ‘What do you want to
say to the outside world?’ Then I established a framework for thinking the question through: ‘Supposing you were invited
to show your photos in a gallery and they asked you to sum up in ten photos your feelings and thoughts and what you
want to recount of your very different existence?’ Once they had overcome their mistrust, discussion got under way and
ideas emerged that began to find expression to in the form of images. We turned our technical limitations into positive
resources: the fact of being unable to print in colour gave us the title for the series A Life in Black and White. We did not
have the right to include recognisable people in our photos, but I was convinced that the body, that ultimately private
territory for each human being, must not be denied: and so the body became a ‘field’ to be written both on and about.
We sought out titles for each image, wrote them out by hand—the body again—and put the two together. To round
things off, one of the participants summarised all the ideas and discussions in the text that accompanies the exhibition.
Marco Ambrosi
Prints by the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles.
ESCAPE TACTICS, A WORKSHOP BY MICHEL GASARIAN
When any art workshop gets under way, it’s often difficult to see what direction it’s going to take and what twists of
good / bad luck it holds in store. Something as obvious as this in a normal situation is by definition much more complex
in prison. Everything resounds there as if in an echo chamber: from voices to sounds, from glances to movements,
from thoughts to feelings. Time and space are suspended, precariously, like a life in parenthesis or in a loop, an opaque
bubble where patches of transparency have to be invented day after day. Transparency that was brought about here by
photography and people’s imaginations. This was a workshop focused on the portrait and its representation, on an identity
at once protected, preserved and thwarted. So we had to build, improvising with the materials to hand, with objects and
artefacts and distorting mirrors. Everything that distorts creates new forms and in this way art generates meaning out
of the unexpected and the unforeseeable. Jean Dubuffet defined art brut as ‘works created by people unscathed by the
culture of art’. We are not far from being that, even if the tools and materials have changed. Now the computer palette
and digital recreation are involved, different techniques meaning different possibilities. The aim of the workshop was an
initiation into photography together with thinking about the image. We looked briefly at the discipline’s history and its
technique (using a 24x36 reflex camera): settings, diaphragm, shutter speed, depth of field, framing, film sensitivity, etc.
At this point things opened up, leaving freedom for reinterpretation and the creation of fictional characters: a world and a
context for expression that offer a brief escape from the other context that is imprisonment.
Michel Gasarian
Michel Gasarian is represented by Signatures.
Prints by the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles.
PHOTO OBJECTIVE: PARIS CLICKS ON ITS KIDS
AN EXHIBITION PRESENTED BY THE CITY OF PARIS EDUCATION AUTHORITY
This creative photographic project is presented by 1500 children from Parisian elementary schools and learning centres,
accompanied by artist-photographers from Maison du Geste et de l’Image and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie,
as well as learning-centre teams and plastic arts teachers from throughout the city of Paris. Following their route, which
tracks the natural progression of the streets of Paris, they enrich their own view, somewhere between reality and the
poetic imagination, of the capital’s daily life. Through it, and through their images, they discover a specific vocabulary of
the plastic. This project, conceived by the Directorate of School Activities of the city of Paris, is part of Art for Growth, an
initiative by the city of Paris aimed at improving access for all the city’s children to culture; its institutions, and its facilities
for education in the arts.
Exhibition venue: palais de Luppé.
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THE RENCONTRES WORKSHOPS
For over forty years the Rencontres workshops have been giving professional and amateur photographers the chance
to undertake personal projects involving the big issues in photography. A great opportunity to meet and exchange with
the top people in their field.
A Day with Paolo Roversi
A Day with Joan Fontcuberta
A Day with Agence VII and 4 of its photographers
Martine Ravache / Understanding and deciphering images, Alberto García-Alix / Keeping an eye out, Pierre Gonnord / Meeting another you, Jean-Christian Bourcart / The Private Sphere: Liberty and limits, Paolo Woods / Telling stories,
Klavdij Sluban / Mediterranean journeys, Diana Lui / The intimate portrait, Christopher Morris / Developing a personal style,
Jean-Christophe Béchet / Territory, space and time, Laure Vasconi / Play of light, Grégoire Korganow / The photographic
‘I’, Antoine d’Agata / Taking photography to its limits, Serge Picard / The Portrait: intention and technical skills, Frédéric
Lecloux / Photographic narrative, Éric Bouvet / The Reportage: Technical skills and personal involvement, Ludovic
Carème / The Portrait: an intimate, committed style, Léa Crespi / Looking at things, Arnaud Baumann / Pictures on the
page, Olivier Culmann / Finding your own voice, Antonin Kratochvil / Faces in the city, Laurence Leblanc / Going
beneath the surface, Tina Merandon / The body in space, Youth Workshop / Photography goes click, Jean-Luc
Maby / From heritage to portrait, Jérôme Brézillon/ Southern paths: a personal point of view.
PHOTO FOLIO REVIEW & GALLERY
Coming up for its sixth edition, Photo Folio Review & Gallery offers photographers portfolio assessments during Opening
Week, together with the chance to exhibit their images throughout the Rencontres d’Arles 2011. All you have to do is
register: Photo Folio Review & Gallery is open to all photographers whatever their approach and mode of image treatment.
Assessment is carried out by international experts: publishers, exhibition curators, museum directors, agency chiefs,
gallerists, collectors, critics, press art directors and others. In the course of personal discussion with the chosen experts,
each participant is given a constructive critical appreciation of his work, together with invaluable advice and contacts. It
even happens that there are offers of exhibitions and / or publication. Every year a jury made up of Rencontres d’Arles and
FNAC representatives chooses five prizewinners: the first is given an exhibition as part of the official selection for the next
Rencontres, with other prizes for the remaining four. This year, the laureate of the 2010 Photo Folio Review will be shown
in the salle Henri Comte. Photo Folio Review – 4-10 July / Photo Folio Gallery – 4 July-29 August.
With the support of the Fnac.
BACK TO SCHOOL IN IMAGES: 45,000 PARTICIPANTS SINCE 2004
5-17 SEPTEMBER
Over the last years the operation has offered steadily increasing and diverse possibilities as part of a project unique in
France. From kindergarten to Masters level, the Rencontres give 330 different school classes the chance to spend a full
day discovering images and the sheer richness of Arles’ cultural heritage: architecture, history, design, the visual arts,
etc. A range of twelve different activities enables teachers to build their own multidisciplinary, interactive programmes
with backup from professional liaison staff. Thus students can engage in turn with the reading of images, screenings,
encounters, hands-on workshops and more. Back to School in Pictures invites them to shape their own opinions on the
images they are surrounded by every day, while developing their curiosity and a critical bent. Every year teachers and
students are given the tools needed for preparing for the event and for putting the experience acquired in Arles to work
once they are back in class. This project responds fully to the needs of teachers and to Ministry of Education guidelines.
Partners associated with this event :
A financing network: The Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur Region, the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur Cultural Affairs Office, the Languedoc-Roussillon Region,
the Ministry of Education, Youth and Community Associations (Scéren/CNDP; the Aix-Marseille, Nice and Montpellier Education Authorities; the AixMarseille Education Authority Documentation Centre), City of Arles.
Local government backing means that student transport costs are partially or fully covered. A network of cultural institutions contribute to the programme by providing activities for participants: National School of Photography; Musée Réattu; Musée Départemental de l’Arles Antique; Muséon
Arlaten; Château d’Avignon; The Architecture, Urbanism and Environment Councils of the Bouches-du-Rhône, Gard and Hérault départements; Centre
des Monuments Nationaux—Abbaye de Montmajour.
AN EYE IN MY POCKET
This year’s subject is ‘passion’, and students from five secondary schools are going to provide the basis
for a verbal narrative and use a cell phone camera to shape a series of images of passionate intensity. This
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is neither image as illustration nor text explaining images; the work of the group will accumulate, giving rise
to a third creative stage. This project exactly matches the issues in image education today and is based on
the principle of interdisciplinarity. It has a dual aim: to develop a critical eye via contact with photographs and
interactive professional guidance that emphasizes experimentation; and to enrich students’ imaginations and
open up new creative perspectives in everyday life via the use of that most familiar of tools, the cell phone…
Participating schools: CFA BTP, Arles; Lycée Perdiguier, Arles; Lycée Daudet, Tarascon; Lycée Philippe de Girard, Avignon; Lycée agricole Les Alpilles,
St Rémy de Provence. After completion of the work sessions, the overall results have been turned into a booklet; each student has ten copies to give
out as he or she pleases. The participating classes met on 9 May at the Perdiguier secondary school, so that students can get to know each other and
receive their booklets.
Project partners: Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (PACA) Region, Secondary Schools Department; PACA Region Cultural Affairs Office (DRAC). With the
support of the Aix-Marseille Education Authority.
HIGH SCHOOL PHOTO COMPETITION
‘Go to the blackboard!’ That’s the subject of the competition organised by the Ministry of Education and the
student magazine L’Étudiant.
Participants are free to choose their medium (digital, film, cell phone), their style (poetic, humorous, fantasy)
and their category (single photo, series). Open to all high school students in France and abroad, the competition
is decided by an Internet vote. At the end of the month, the three photos that have received the most votes in
the ‘single image’ and ‘series’ categories will be chosen for the grand final runoff in June 2011. The prize giving
ceremony takes place in Arles on Monday 11 July.
Rencontres d’Arles Partners: The Ministry of Education, Youth and Community Associations, L’Étudiant, Scéren-CNDP, Images magazine, Kodak,
Éditions Thierry Magnier, La Maison du Geste et de l’Image in Paris.
AN EXPERIMENTAL PROJECT: ‘NICE ONE!’
This project offers an innovative, fun approach to images. It has the backing of the Youth Experimental Fund
(Fonds d’expérimentation pour la jeunesse) as part of the Minister for Youth’s call for projects relating to young
people’s cultural practices (2010). The goals of the project are:
- To help young people cut off from the cultural scene to decode images, especially in an everyday context, so that
every young citizen can bring a personal, informed eye to the images surrounding him.
- To encourage photography both within the education system and outside it.
- To promote experience-sharing between cultural, social and educational actors via exchanges of ideas and
shared action on the theme of the image.
The project will be monitored by an expert advisory committee and will be developed over three years. After this initial experimental phase and
assessment of the results by the Culture and Communication Laboratory at the University of Avignon, it will be extended to the whole of France.
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RENCONTRES
MICHEL BOUVET
Born in 1955 in Tunis. Lives and works in Paris.
After studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (painting department), Michel Bouvet very quickly turned
to posters. His work as a poster designer and graphic artist was mainly for cultural events (theatre, opera, music, dance,
museums, festivals), institutional affairs (local authorities, public institutions), or publishers. As such he has had more than seventy
one-man shows in thirty countries across the world. He has received many awards from most of the great international poster
biennials. He has also been frequently invited to them as a jury member. In France he was awarded the Grand Prix de l’Affiche
Culturelle at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 1987 and in 1992. He teaches at the ESAG / Penninghen, Paris, and is a member
of the International Graphic Alliance. He is exhibition curator for the Mois du graphisme (Month of Graphics) at Échirolles, France.
www.michelbouvet.com
THE RENCONTRES D’ARLES
What vegetable is that? Which animal? What’s it all about? Michel Bouvet’s posters for the Rencontres d’Arles
provoke hundreds of questions each year, which we are incapable of answering. When we needed to re-launch
the Rencontres in 2002, we consulted some very grand graphic studios; the brief was to ‘ginger up’ the message.
Michel Bouvet took us at our word and got the job. But from the very first year confusion reigned. Instead of
ginger, some interpreted it as a pimento, or a carrot; taxi-drivers in Arles would ask me what that loaf of corn
bread was on the bus-shelters, and so it went on. But, in fact, what looked like being a total failure as far as the
message was concerned turned out to be a marvellous topic of conversation and a good way of creating the buzz.
So we decided to dig ourselves deeper into the absurd. Over the years we’ve moved out of the orchard and into
the zoo, but Michel Bouvet’s method has stayed the same. We have to have the poster the autumn before the
festival, even though the programme is far from complete. But Michel Bouvet insists that he can only design the
thing if he knows what the programme is. This means that every year we embark on an enjoyable game of liar’s
poker in which we give a totally imaginary programme to our favourite poster designer and he in turn comes back
to us with twenty or so very pretty designs in coloured crayon, which have nothing to do either with each other or
with the imaginary programme. Then the team and the President of the Rencontres go into the ritual of choosing
which one is to be the visual for the year. Hypocritically, and slightly to reassure ourselves, even though our minds
are already made up, we always ask ‘the opinion of the Michel Bouvet studio’. The answer is always evasive and
gets everybody off the hook. Nonetheless, in our frustration at having to reject so many designs that we could
have chosen every year, we plan to mark the tenth year under the new dispensation by sharing with the public all
the proposed designs along with the process of creating the poster which in all its forms, from the catalogue to
the mugs, has become the mascot of the Rencontres d’Arles.
François Hébel, artistic director of the Rencontres d’Arles.
Exhibition realised with the support of Gares & Connexions.
Mounting and canvas by the Atelier Robin Tourenne, Paris.
Exhibition venue: Atelier de Maintenance, Parc des Ateliers.
CULTURAL EVENT POSTERS
Michel Bouvet is one of today’s best-known poster makers, both in France and abroad. This profoundly humanistic
artist graduated from the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1978. An illustrated poster—the advertising
variety aside—is aimed at a range of publics: people in the street, cultural circles and connoisseurs. The theatre,
opera and cultural centre kinds demand real dialogue between client and creator: the author of the play, the
director or the head of the centre has to be questioned so as to home in on the work’s specific features, style and
meaning. A detailed, respectful breakdown of Shakespeare, Jean Genet or Chekhov is a basic requirement which
Michel Bouvet undertakes scrupulously, shaping a graphic translation of his subject that reflects the rigorous
personal criteria that are his trademark. With its powerfully distinctive language a Bouvet poster conveys all the
essentials, catching and holding our eye and obliging us to understand while at the same time intriguing us with
its accomplished use of graphics and / or photography. For Bouvet the creative process begins with drawing, but
it can also involve the work of photographer / artists like Francis Laharrague and sometimes call for the creation
of an artefact. One striking example of the latter was the letter H for Shakespeare’s Hamlet: a three-dimensional,
crenellated metal piece that was then photographed. The Bouvet style is defined first and foremost by the black
border and the outlining of the forms. The areas of flat (and often primary) colour are sealed off by these lines.
There is a coldly lucid side to his mechanical, not to say scientific process of analysis and breakdown that could
make his art seem impersonal. But this is art aimed at everyone, leaving the viewer free to interpret according to
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a specific set of criteria, as was the case with the Pop Art of the sixties and seventies. Viewers discovering a new
poster must be taken by surprise and informed. To retain their attention, Bouvet turns this art of the ephemeral
into a graphic, visual and intellectual exercise. Bouvet is looking for universality: his visually compelling symbols
and tweaked artefacts demand a reaction. The success of a play or a festival also hinges on identification on
the part of those directly involved: on establishing a kind of mutual understanding between client and public.
As a committed teacher, Bouvet excels in the art of guiding and transmitting; as a poster artist specialising in
the cultural domain, he uses his mastery of visual metaphor to enhance the message and enthuse the viewer.
Marie-Pascale Prévost-Bault, Chief Curator, Musées Départementaux de la Somme.
Excerpt from the exhibition catalogue :Michel Bouvet, Affichiste (Michel Bouvet, Poster Artist) will be on show at the Museum in the Abbaye de SaintRiquier Baie de Somme from 25 June – 22 October 2011.
Mounting and canvas by the Atelier Robin Tourenne, Paris.
Exhibition venue: abbaye de Montmajour.
EVENING SCREENINGS
Tuesday, 5 July, Théâtre Antique
THE MEXICAN SUITCASE
For the first time, a gala screening of Trisha Ziff’s film telling the story of Robert Capa’s ‘Mexican’ suitcase, a
treasure that was sought for more than sixty years. It contained negatives of photographs documenting the
Spanish Civil War, taken by Robert Capa, Chim (David Seymour) and Gerda Taro. It was saved, like the Spanish
republicans in the internment camps at Argelès-sur-Mer, by Mexican diplomats around 1940.
A SHORT MEXICAN HISTORY 1 / 3
The exhibitions in Arles in 2011 are devoted mainly to contemporary work, but to put them into perspective three
Mexican experts in the field will appear on successive evenings at the Théâtre Antique. Each will cover an aspect
of this history which he or she sees as particularly important. The guest speakers will be Patricia Mendoza, former
director and co-founder of Centro de la Imagen, director of Zul Editions; Mauricio Maillé, director of the Visual Arts
section of the Televisa Foundation; and Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, photographer an founder of the review Luna Cornea.
OSKAR-BARNACK-LEICA PRIZE
Since 1979, the Leica Camera group has been awarding a prize honouring Oskar Barnack (1879-1936), inventor
of the Leica and father of today’s photojournalism. The prize goes to a photographer whose work encapsulates
humanity’s relationship with its environment. For the second successive year the Leica Camera group is offering
a further prize, the Leica Newcomer Award, for a photographer under the age of twenty-five. In line with a long
tradition, the prizes will be presented in Arles.
Wednesday, 6 July, Théâtre Antique
In theory the VII agency and Tendance Floue are diametrically opposed. The former is a group of recognised
photojournalists covering news events and issues with global implications. The latter comprises
individuals exploring the world via a highly atypical creative workshop approach. This one-night photographic
event marking their respective anniversaries reveals shared concerns.
EUROPEAN PUBLISHERS AWARD
Five European publishers—Actes Sud (France), Dewi Lewis Publishing (UK), Peliti Associati (Italy), Kehrer Verlag
(Germany) and Apeiron (Greece)—join forces to publish a photography book. The author they choose will receive
his or her award during the festival.
TRIBUTE TO ROGER THÉROND
A screening organised by Jean-Jacques Naudet, Didier Rapaud, Guillaume Clavières and Marc Brincourt tells of
the story of Photo founding father and of Paris Match editor. Roger Thérond, an ardent collecor, died ten years
ago but still remains with us through this tribute paid to him by Edmonde Charles-Roux, Sylvie Aubenas, Olivier
Royant, Jean-François Leroy, Philippe Garner and Sebastião Salgado.
Screenings by Coïncidence.
Music : Donkey Monkey (Eve Risser, piano and Yuko Oshima, battery).
Thursday 7 July, Théâtre Antique
MITCH EPSTEIN, LAUREATE OF THE PICTET PRIZE
In this multi-media presentation, Mitch Epstein explores the motivation and method for his recent project
American Power. Begun in 2003, spanning five years and twenty-five states, American Power examines energy
production and consumption in the United States and how they have become manifest in the country’s
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landscape. Epstein also reflects on the origins of the project, which reach back to work he made earlier
in his career; and on the final leg of the project, which coincided with the historic 2008 American presidential
election.This presentation will include an original score performed live by renowned cellist Erik Friedlander.
His mixture of classical and contemporary styles—deeply rooted, in part, in the American vernacular—enters
into a conversation with Epstein’s photographs and commentary to haunting effect.
The world’s first photography prize specifically devoted to sustainable development, the Pictet Prize addresses
the new millennium’s most urgent social and environmental challenges by using photography to increase public
awareness of the problems that really count. In 2008 and 2009 the themes were, respectively, Water and Earth,
with the winning projects submitted by Benoît Aquin and Nadav Kander. For the third edition the theme is Growth.
The prize was awarded by Kofi Annan on 17 March 2011 at the opening of an exhibition of works by the shortlisted
artists at the Passage de Retz, Paris. The shortlisted artists are: Christian Als, Edward Burtynsky, Stéphane Couturier,
Chris Jordan, Yeondoo Jung, Vera Lutter, Nyaba Leon Ouedraogo, Taryn Simon, Thomas Struth, Guy Tillim and
Michael Wolf. Each year, in addition to the prize, Pictet & Co. backs a sustainable development project relating to the
competition theme. The first two Commissions were completed by Munem Wasif (Bangladesh, 2008) and Ed Kashi
(Madagascar, 2009). The name of the photographer chosen for the third Commission will also be announced on 17
April. This Commission will focus on the Nakuprat Conservancy in Northern Kenya. The resulting photographs will
be premiered at an exhibition at Diemar Noble Photography in London in October. The screening will be associated
with a cello concert performed by Erik Friedlander, composer, improviser and veteran of NYC’s downtown scene.
A SHORT MEXICAN HISTORY 2 / 3 : see Tuesday, 5 July.
DISCOVERY AWARD OF THE RENCONTRES D’ARLES
Screening of the fifteen artists nominated in 2011, presented by Simon Baker, first curator of photography at
the Tate Modern in London, Chris Boot, executive director of Aperture Foundation in New York, Sam Stourdzé,
director of the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, David Barriet, David Benassayag, Béatrice Didier, all three founders
and directors of the Point du Jour Centre d’art/Éditeur in Cherbourg, and Artur Walther, collector and founder of
the Walther Collection in Neu-Ulm, Germany.
Musicians: Marc Simon (trombone and xylophone), Pierre Peyras (double bass), Bernard Mourier (piano) and Jean-Michel Thiriet (guitar).
Friday, 8 July, Arènes d’Arles
NIGHT OF THE YEAR
The seventh Night of the Year imbues the streets surrounding the Arènes d’Arles with a festive atmosphere to
accompany a grand photographic tour. As part of the tour, different artists from newspapers, magazines, and
photographic agencies and groups display their year’s work on fourteen screens.
AFP, Argos, Arte, Contour by Getty, Contrasto, Elle, Express Style, GQ, Hans Lucas, Bar Floréal, Le Monde Mag, Libération, LuzPhoto, Maison de
l’Europe en Géorgie, Modds’, Myop, News, Noor, Ostkreuz, Palm Springs Festival, Panos, Photographie.com, Picture Tank, PhotoPhomPenh Festival,
Private, Prospekt, Reuters, prix SFR Jeunes Talents, Signatures, Stiletto, Temps Machine, Tendance Floue, VII, Voxpop, VU’, World Press Photo…
Direction artistique : Claudine Maugendre et Aurélien Valette.
Saturday, 9 July, Théâtre Antique
JR
The pseudonym is a telling indication of this photographer’s sense of humour and his acute awareness of what
he is doing. To assume the name of the most abject character in the television series Dallas, the very emblem of
capitalism at its selfish height, is an act of appropriation of the system on its own terrain, the better to undermine
it from the inside; he then seizes power and draws us towards his own message. JR does not seek virtuoso
effects in his photography. In each of his projects, he has set himself up as the observer of a community. With
his posters, posted in the crisis landscape itself, he has invented a new implement of mediation and means of
distribution. Personal glory is not his thing; he prefers the anonymity and the sense of collective adventure that
his projects foster. His use of humour shows courage and he manipulates the press, the Internet and the art
market to his own ends, which have the great merit of being purely political, even though the word may frighten
his generation. He takes sides, forces us to see things from his point of view. In a word, he is committed. He was
discovered at Clichy-sous-Bois in 2006; the Arles public went wild for him in 2007. Since then he has met with
dazzling success and has developed a string of exciting projects that confirm his talent as much as they reinforce
his message. He was awarded the prestigious TED prize in the United States in 2011; he will be back in Arles for
the closing evening to present all the projects he has set up around the world with his team and the fans that
follow him on the Internet.
A SHORT MEXICAN HISTORY 3 / 3 : see Tuesday, 5 July.
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THE RENCONTRES D’ARLES PRIZEGIVING CEREMONY
Announcement of the winners of the Discovery Award and the new LUMA Award (25,000 euros each); and of
the winners of the Author and Historical Book Awards (8,000 euros each). A screening of the ten years of the
Rencontres d’Arles awards is also presented.
Screening by Coïncidence.
THE RENCONTRES D’ARLES VILLAGE
This is the second year that the Rencontres d’Arles is devoting an exhibition area to all those involved in the
publishing and distribution of photography—publishers, booksellers, specialised journals and institutions. From
4-10 July, Le Village acts as a highly original meeting place for the many amateurs, collectors, and professionals
from all over the world, who attend the opening days of the Rencontres d’Arles. This new, simpler version of the
Rencontres d’Arles Village, with its friendly and convivial atmosphere, is located in the ruin of the Forges, in the
very heart of the Parc des Ateliers.
SYMPOSIUMS
PHOTOGRAPHY, THE INTERNET AND SOCIAL NETWORKS
Chaired by Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of the Rencontres d’Arles, university professor in Sciences Po
Paris, and François Hébel, director of the Rencontres d’Arles. Organised by Françoise Docquiert, lecturer
at University of Paris I, Panthéon Sorbonne. Led by Pierre Haski, director of Rue89.
Wednesday 6 July, 10 am to 1 pm / The Image Economy
How Internet changed our point of view on images? How photography, its broadcast and economy have changed
because and thanks to those new medias?
Opening by Jean-Noël Jeanneney, chairman, lecturer at the École des Sciences Politiques de Paris, media
historian specialised in the relationship between photography and the Internet ; André Gunthert, researcher
at the EHESS, director of the Laboratoire d’histoire visuelle contemporaine (Lhivic), editor of Culture Visuelle
L’image fluide; David Campbell, photography consultant, writer, award-winning multimedia producer, and member
of the Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies at Durham University <www.david-campbell.org>;
Frank Evers, founder of INSTITUTE, a management company representing leading visual artists, president of
Evergreen Pictures, a production company serving clients in the broadcast, commercial and cultural fields <www.
emphas.is>; Karim Ben Khelifa, photographer, founding member of the website <www.emphas.is>.
Thursday 7 July, 10 am to 1 pm / Photography and the Internet
What are the terms for the outbreak of a photographic world centered on the Internet? What could lead to it? What
does it mean to be an author? What are the new ways of exhibiting and understanding those oeuvres?
Joan Fontcuberta, photographer, co-curator of From Here On with Clément Cheroux, Erik Kessels, Martin Parr
and Joachim Schmid; Penelope Umbrico, lecturer in photography, visual and related media at the School of
Visual Arts, New York City; Thomas Mailaender, artist and multimedia photographer; Fred Ritchin, lecturer at
the New York University Tisch School of the Art, editor-in-chief for the New York Times Magazine (1978-82) and
Camera Arts magazine (1982-83), curator of the New York Photo Festival in 2010, the director of PixelPress.
<www.pixelpress.org>; Guillaume Herbaut, photographer, founding member of L’oeil Public, he works on the
Internet to produce documentaries (La Zone, interactive work on the prohibited zone of Tchernobyl shown in
the Gaité Lyrique); Marie Anne Ferry Fall, legal director of ADAGP (the rights of the authors in the visual arts).
Friday 8 July, 10 am to 1 pm / Photography and social networks (flash back on the tunisian Arab Spring)
How social networks change our creativity and information? How one could fiddle on the Internet via Facebook,
Twitter and blogs and broadcast information? How collaborative websites invent tools to get around censorship?
Lina ben Mhenni, teacher, bloger, journalist and prime eye-witness of the Arab Spring in Tunisia; Brian Storm,
founding member and director of MediaStorm, a multimedia production studio broadcasting on the Internet;
Benjamin Chesterton, co-founder with David White of the website Duckrabbit, working with photography and
social networks. <http://duckrabbit.info/blog>; Vincent Glad, journalist on Slate.fr, student in Arts et Langages
at the EHESS; Azyz Amami, or azyz405, a Tunisian blogger, took part in the Arab Spring.
In partnership with the magazine Connaissance des Arts and Rue89.
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THE HUMAN SNAPSHOT
A three-day colloquium co-produced with Bard College’s Curatorial Studies Program (New York), centred
on the theme of universalism and its forms in contemporary art and photography, bringing together worldfamous experts and other notable guests. The programme includes closed-door work sessions, a colloquium
(open to the public), and a programme of workshops, film and video screenings, and encounter sessions.
Closing the programme, the LUMA Foundation will screen an open-air slideshow at Alyscamps.
July 2, 3, 4: full programme available at <www.bard.edu>
SEMINAR
10, 11, 12 July, Théâtre d’Arles
PHOTOGRAPHY: HEADING TOWARDS NEW FRONTIERS?
Photography has never gone it alone, but its relationship with the other arts has fluctuated between rivalries and
truces. From the outset, it was a cause of anxiety to a great many painters, while others incorporated it incidentally or
intentionally into their creative processes. Photography’s relationship with the cinema has also given rise to a good
deal of discussion, and Chris Marker’s film La Jetée is still a source of controversy. Nowadays, much is said about
multimedia, but photography is still somewhere on the bridge. Between screens and software, galleries, live theatre,
and the telephone, does photography still have its own separate identity? An underlying specificity? Collage and
montage belong to photography and the cinema. Can these concepts also be applied to multimedia, where the image
is no longer an end in itself but one element among others? This 9th edition of the seminar will attempt, in lectures
and exchanges, to question the role of photography today. We will also be raising questions about what educational
strategies might enable mediators and teachers to guide young people towards practical, theoretical, original and
suitable approaches to the subject. Images and photography are still present in everyday life and creation though
maybe in a more ‘unstable’ way. We need to use this instability to create new artistic and pedagogical projects...
Organised by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Community Associations (Inspectorate General, Teaching Department, National Educational Documentation Centre); Ministry of Culture and Communications (Direction Générale de la création artistique, Cultural Policy and Innovation Coordination); National Institute for Youth and Education (INJEP), under the supervision of the ministry in charge of youth affairs; La Ligue de l’Enseignement;
the Maison du Geste et de l’Image, Paris; the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles.
EUROPEAN ENCOUNTERS AIX_ARLES_AVIGNON
9 July—Arles, 13 July—Aix-en-Provence, 26 July—Avignon.
Initiated by the Festival of Avignon in 2007, the Rencontres Européennes are devoted to discussion and debate
about the European project via the prism of art and culture. Extended to embrace the Festival of Aix-en-Provence
in 2008 and the Rencontres d’Arles in 2010, they represent a great opportunity for interchange between the
public, artists, cultural operators, political and economic actors, and civil society. Continuing this year with a
half-day session at each festival, they will be offering interviews with artists with European reputations. Artists
with something to say about the big questions underlying the European project are still not being given enough
attention. Intercultural dialogue, multiple identities, linguistic diversity, crossborder exchanges, cultural rights:
these are the subjects that drive them, and their ideas can be enlightening for us all.
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ASSOCIATED PROGRAMMS
SFR YOUNG PHOTO TALENT GALLERY
For this 7 th edition, SFR Young Talent is presenting six photographers from the competition SFR organised for
the 2011 Rencontres d’Arles. This year’s theme was ‘South of the Gaze’ and it reveals different photographers’
quests either within home frontiers or like some, back from journeys into Latino culture, in other universes. The
prize-winners’ pictures, whether documentary or plastic art, reflect the day to day variety of blended lives. The
twenty-three year old Belgian photographer Marin Hock, SFR Young Talent prize-winner for 2011, demonstrates
a double talent as art and documentary photographer. His work on the hospital centre is evidence of this duality:
on the one hand, a remarkable photographic presence and, at the same time, a strongly artistic approach that
enriches the whole of the series. The exhibition will be accompanied by a selection of photographs by the patron
of the 2011 SFR Young Photo Talent Prize, Patrick Tournebœuf.
MARIN HOCK PRIZEWINNER SFR YOUNG TALENT PHOTO 2011
Moving between Brussels, his home town, London and São Paolo, Marin Hock resembles the ‘passeurs-dancers’
that he photographs in New York. Choreographer of visions perceived by an eye smitten with all colours of the
spectrum, demanding master of composition, living in a permanent state of photographic jubilation, at 23 years
of age Marin Hock embodies the passions of an art unrestricted to a single genre. In his work, which he insists is
‘free of all barriers’, this winner of the SFR Young Talent Photo Award 2011 lives the balancing act between a bold
documentary style—as evidenced in his photographs of an institutional psychotherapy centre—and a delight in
more stylized, stage-directed work for the fashion world. A ‘barrier-free’ must-see!
Alain Mingam
LUMA ARLES 2011
An exhibition is not an objects container but a form. It is not the final space of a presentation but a format of
appearing. The LUMA Foundation functions as an exhibitions production company. During the summer 2011,
LUMA will present 6 forms. They are the first signals from its future institutions program and departments. Trisha
Donnelly, winner for the luma award 2010, in the saint-honorat des alyscamps church. 15 artists, nominees
for the luma award 2011, within the pages of a paperback.16 thinkers and artists under the ephemeral tent of
a symposium: the human snapshot (2-4 july 2011, www.bard.edu). A three-dimensional bibliography. A public
slideshow at the alyscamps (4 july 2011). The first chapter of a doug aitken’s installation.
DOUG AITKEN, ARLES : A CITY OF MOVING IMAGES
The piece itself is a unique piece that will never be an edition or travel anywhere outside this landscape. To me,
the importance is that it’s created from the DNA of that place but it will only ever reside in it. It almost sits in
the middle of this huge invisible grid we’ve created to make the work, and it’s a deposit of all of those faults and
divisions of the landscape coming together to create one—almost holographic—fictional landscape.
Doug Aitken
Exhibition venue: place de la République, 4-12 July.
TRISHA DONNELLY
Trisha Donnelly is among a generation of artists to have come of age over the past decade or so, whose practice
seems rooted in incommunicability and opacity. Often taking the form of gatherings of objects in various media,
from assembled sculptures to drawings and photographs, Donnelly’s exhibitions tease the viewer with their
intimations of meaning; orientation within these spaces is seldom straightforward, but is pregnant with possibility.
Hans Ulrich Obrist and Beatrix Ruf, curators of the exhibition.
Exhibition venue: église Saint-Honorat-des-Alyscamps, 4 July-29 August.
FOAM
WHAT’S NEXT?
In 2011, Foam—the Amsterdam photography museum—celebrates its tenth anniversary. For this reason Foam
has initiated a project titled What’s Next? about the future of a medium and of a society in transition. Foam is
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asking artists, critics, writers, academics, researchers, curators and media specialists to formulate their own
inspirational visions of the future of photography, based on their specific knowledge. To achieve meaningful results
it is essential for Foam to be in close contact with our public, with artists and with representatives of the international
photography community. But Foam also sees it as its task to initiate, coordinate and value a debate that transcends
traditional boundaries. This debate will continue 24 / 7 throughout the year on www.foam.org/whatsnext.
During 2011 Foam addressed the question What’s Next? through a range of activities varying from debates,
exhibitions and publications, starting with an expert meeting held at Foam Amsterdam on Saturday, 19 March 2011.
In July Foam is in Arles for a presentation of What’s Next? Along with Regards et Mémoires, which is organising
activities for the eighth year in a row during the Recontres d’Arles, it presents exhibitions and discussions on
the future of photography. In addition Foam has asked students from the National School of Photography in
Arles and the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam to set up a studio in the Bourse de Travail. Here they present
works on the theme of What’s Next? Foam and Regards et Mémoires also show a selection of Foam Talents
2011 in the La Roquette neighbourhood. The debate will close with a major exhibition at Foam in autumn 2011.
www.foam.org / www.regardsetmemoires.com
This project has been made possible with the support of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Oschatz Visuelle Medien and BeamSystems.
Exhibition venue: Bourse du Travail.
THE CENTRE DES MONUMENTS NATIONAUX PRESENTS NICOLAS GUILBERT
Born in 1958 in Paris. Lives and works in Paris.
An illustrator from his teenage years through the mid-90s, Nicolas Guilbert had his first show in Paris in 1984 (Coco:
Drawings and paintings based on a photograph by Robert Doisneau, Attitude Gallery). Since then he has published several
books of drawings (in particular Rue des Italiens, Le Monde—La Découverte, 1990). In diverse Parisian art galleries he has
shown multiple facets of a graphically oriented pictorial œuvre, one that has always emphasized line drawings on paper media.
Parallel to this career track he has also worked as a photographer, resulting in publication of several books, including
Animaux & Cie (Grasset, 2010), the fruit of twenty-five years of reportage; images from this work were shown at the André Villers
Museum of Photography in Mougins during the summer of 2009. His most recent photographic exhibition, Animonuments,
a sentimental journey across France, was presented at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature from April to June 2011.
ANIMONUMENTS, A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY ACROSS FRANCE
Nicolas Guilbert, a painter and photographer, has already explored the theme of animals in an urban context.
He agrees to an invitation from the Museum of Hunting and Nature to revisit this endeavour, in the context of a
partnership between the museum and the Centre des Monuments Nationaux. The two institutions are collaborating
on a ‘Monuments and Animals’ initiative that will sponsor activities at sites run by the centre throughout the
country. Wandering over the course of many months, Nicolas Guilbert tracks in each site the unexpected presence
of animals. He observes the way these uninvited guests succeed in appropriating the geography of memory.
Guilbert brings back from his expedition a large number of ‘souvenir-images’. He displays them flush with the
wall, following the lead of the ‘print rooms’ that flourished in England in the XVIIIth century; the layout of these
pieces appears to be the decorative consequence of the birth of tourism. In those days young, aristocratic
Britons crisscrossed Europe in order to refine their education through contact with items of classical culture.
Their ‘Grand Tour’ engendered art collections, and in particular collections of prints and other engravings
representing the sites visited. Brought home as souvenirs, these engravings were often displayed fastened directly
to the walls of offices, within trompe-l’œil frames or as a form of wallpaper. The appearance of a new literary
genre, the travel narrative, was another consequence of this touristic phenomenon… Parallel to the narration
of scientific expeditions a subjective variant appeared, the ‘sentimental journey’; it was a format that the writer
Laurence Sterne delighted in parodying. Nicolas Guilbert offers us a contemporary interpretation; with humour
and poetry he imagines a photographic travelogue of his voyage through the monuments of classical France.
Exhibition venue: abbaye de Montmajour.
LE MÉJAN
CHRISTOPHE AGOU
Born in 1969 in France.
Christophe Agou is self-taught. He discovered photography while travelling in Europe and the United States then
settled in New York in 1992. Shortly after that, he began a series of pictures of people on the subway. This resulted in a
book, Life Below. In 2002, he returned to his native region of Forez, in France, and embarked on an extensive project
documenting the lives of farming families in this harsh region; the work culminated in his series Facing silence. In 2006,
he was a W. Eugene Smith Award finalist and, in 2008, a finalist in the Paris Academy of Fine Arts Photography Award.
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The next year he was awarded ‘Mention spéciale in the Kodak Photographic Critics’ Award, France. His work has been
published and exhibited in galleries and muséums throughout the world, including: MoMA, New York; Museum of Fine
Arts, Houston; Jeu de Paume Museum, Paris; Noorderlicht Festival, Holland; and at photography festivals in China.
Christophe Agou’s project Facing silence was awarded the 17 th European Publishers Award for Photography.
He came to the notice of international critics for several works, particularly Life Below, 2004—a series shot
in the New York subway. He was born in Monbrison, a small town at the foot of the Forez hills, in the Loire
Department, France. He left France in 1992 and settled in New York. This early voluntary exile, an urge to
immerse himself in a completely different world, is typical of the work that Agou has been developing over the
last twenty years: an intuitive and empirical exploration of universes, situations and people that he comes to
understand by a gradual process of absorption, not realising it has happened until he finds himself resonating
intimately with them. In the winter of 2002, Christophe Agou returned to his native Forez and roamed around
the harsh landscape there; it had never left his mind. He got to know, and became friends with, farming
families. After eight years, this resulted in Facing silence, which is far from just a documentary about rural life
in early twenty-first century France. The farm doors that Christophe Agou enters on our behalf open to reveal
the faces of men and women who command our respect and give us pause for meditation. The ‘matter’ and
everyday texture of these lives, their work and the elements, like a saga punctuated by very telling, though
motionless, tracking shots, is displayed with almost organic realism. Facing silence is a very special diary about
existences governed by the necessities of hard work and the weight of the seasons. Its sympathetic and contained
power jolts us out of our role as spectator and implicates us—for the space of the film—in a shared destiny.
Exhibition venue: Magasin Électrique, Parc des Ateliers.
CY TWOMBLY, MIQUEL BARCELÓ & DOUGLAS GORDON
Cy Twombly, one of the greatest living artists, is better known for his painting and his sculptures than for his
photography, although he has been doing it for 60 years, along with his friends from the beginning Jasper Johns
and Robert Rauschenberg. This is the first time this important part of his creative output has been displayed in
a French museum. In 2007, Twombly put on the sublime exhibition Blooming at Avignon, for which he painted
a cycle of massive paintings of peonies. This time Twombly has been invited as a photographer and associate
exhibition curator. At the Collection Lambert in Avignon Cy Twombly’s photographic work is to be shown alongside that of Diane Arbus, Sol Witt, and Sally Mann. At the Chapelle du Méjan, Douglas Gordon and Miquel Barceló
question the very idea of the portrait and what it can become. Gordon was featured in Don Delillo’s novel Omega
Point (Actes Sud). Delillo’s started with the hypnotic video installation 24 Hours Psycho, where the film’s running
time had been stretched by the artist to cover an entire day. This installation will be on show in the Chapelle du
Méjan, accompanied by burnt photographs of stars, Selfportrait as you+me, 1998—it is as if a series of icons
were consumed by fire before our eyes—Catherine Deneuve, Romy Schneider, Jean-Louis Trintignant; our own
face appears in reflection in the mirrors on the back of these burnt-out images. Barceló is not a photographer,
and yet his very latest series of paintings will be involved in this disturbing exhibition. In 2010, for Terramare,
his new departure was to paint portraits of albino Africans with bleach. These days Barceló paints portraits
‘blind’ onto a black linen canvas that reacts chemically to the bleach to reveal faces which seem to have gone
through the fire of a strange developing liquid: Deneuve, Podalydès as well as close friends. It is all highly redolent of Rembrandt, in a blackness that evokes the flames and ashes of Douglas Gordon’s enigmatic portraits.
There is a double catalogue, published jointly with Éditions Actes Sud, of photographs by Twombly and other
artists—all chosen with Twombly’s poetic intelligence.
Éric Mézil
Exposition présentée à la chapelle Saint-Martin du Méjan.
TENDANCE FLOUE
Tendance Floue is a collective of fourteen photographers. Its creation in 1991 grew out of a fierce desire to keep a
kind of independence that would guarantee freedom for each one of them. Freedom to explore the world against a tide of
globalised images, to look into the shadows of the subjects they expose, to capture unguarded moments. The attraction of the
collective is that the photographers can venture into unknown territory to get material for their shared photographic research.
Press photography, publishing, exhibitions, screenings, sale of prints, company public relations—the collective can open
any door and use all the modern materials. Nothing is barred. For the last twenty years, an indefinable alchemy of ideas and
energy has given rise to a particular photographic language and enabled them to question the various modes of depiction
and to find a fresh narrative style. Tendance Floue is a new kind of laboratory, founded on the crazy generosity of friendship.
GETTING DOWN TO IT
Tendance Floue has, by dint of its energy, its flair for innovation, and the originality of its mode of functioning,
become a new alternative to the accepted idea of a photographic agency. In the collective dimension of
51
their venture the perceptive we adds up to the sum of all the sensitive first person singular I’s. This is
particularly evident in the famous Mad in reports. In these highly original, tough and incisive reports the
skills and sensibilities of each member shine with great formal and conceptual freedom. In their idealistic
and transgressive way, the Tendance Floue Agency offer ample resistance to the increasingly standardised
distribution and mediatisation practices of photojournalism. Through their challenging attitudes, they give us a
new experience of photography. The collective’s twentieth anniversary provides an opportunity to understand
the spirit that animates them. The mixture of different modes of depiction at the Magasin Électrique,
and the plethora of installations there, take us on a journey to the heart of Tendance Floue. The field of
experience opens on to exhibition spaces and powerful screenings. The two spaces are inhabited in such a
way as to sensitize the public to the fragile but intense balance between the collective work and the individual
universes of the members of the collective—to retell the story of this febrile liberty with a fresh manifestation.
Photographs by Pascal Aimar, Thierry Ardouin, Denis Bourges, Gilles Coulon, Olivier Culmann, Bieke Depoorter, Mat
Jacob, Caty Jan, Philippe Lopparelli, Bertrand Meunier, Meyer, Flore-Aël Surun, Patrick Tournebœuf, Alain Willaume.
Spatial sound design: Dominique Besson.
Exhibition produced with the support of Olympus France, historical partner of Tendance Floue.
THE GALERIE VU’ PRESENTS JOSÉ RAMÓN BAS
Born in Madrid in 1964. Lives and works in Madrid.
In 1979 José Ramón Bas was teaching himself photography when he met photographer Florencio García Méndez, who gave
him a helping hand. In 1985 he began formal studies at the Escuela de la Imagen y el Diseño (IDEP) in Barcelona, where he
was quickly attracted to contemporary forms of expression and the theme of travel memories. In 1989 he moved definitively to
Barcelona and in 1997 he won the La Caixa Foundation’s Fotopress Award for young artists. He began working with the Berini
Gallery in Barcelona and in 1998 moved into a studio in the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Piramidón. After joining Galerie VU’
in 2001, he won the Federico Vender Prize in Italy in 2003, followed by the Arena Foundation Prize in 2004. In 2005 he began
teaching the Masters in Creative Photography at EFTI in Madrid. He has exhibited in Holland, Boston, Lisbon and elsewhere.
JOSÉ RAMÓN BAS
As an extension of the Ndar exhibition presented at Galerie VU’ from May 13 to September 3, the exhibition José
Ramón Bas, from the imaginary to the object offers a cross-sectional narrative through the work of an artist
who defies classification. Bas invents objects that preserve the memories of his experiences, of his emotions.
An indefatigable traveller, mostly in Africa and Latin America, he shoots pictures of the people and landscapes
he encounters. Back in his workshop in Spain, as the imaginary blends with memory, he starts to transform his
images into objects. Photographs, while reproducible by nature, become unique thanks to the artist’s inspiration
and the different ways he brings it to bear: he draws boats and people directly on the print, he glues silver paper
on its surface, he scratches the very image. This original photograph, a perfect reconstitution of the memory and
associated emotions, is finally sealed under a coat of resin. As chunks of memory encapsulated in blocs of resin,
José Ramón Bas’s objects give rise to dreams, and invite the viewer to gather up his own memories: memories
of instants forever gone, but which such pieces, created by an artist, keep indefinitely alive in our imagination.
THE IN-BETWEEN IMAGE
For the 2011 edition of the Rencontres d’Arles we present a programme of both long- and short-form films, by and
about the artists of the Galerie VU’ (along with a number of fellow-travellers), all focused on the thin frontier separating
still and moving images. These are films that, in the end, bring us closer to our artists, their viewpoints, their
sensibilities and to the fictions they invent. The in-between image is also a meditation on motion, time and desire.
It circles around the idea of a time before and after the image, when photography, forced into motion by cinema,
metamorphoses; around the notion of viewpoint, of source as well, when an author, director or photographer
chooses to take up the motion-picture camera to create the portrait of another, always in search of that common
object of desire which is the image… In 2010, the photographer Jean-Christian Bourcart presented his second
feature-length film, In Memory of Days to Come. Élodie Bouchez plays Maya, a promising artist who has just
moved to New York. Bourcart explores here a new level of consciousness based on the ability of people to dream
together, to the point where they must posit the real existence of a single state of being, that of the waking dream.
When one watches his video Bardo, or photographs of his Traffic series, or the images and texts of Or death
must claim you (Sinon la mort te gagnait), one understands, at the heart of the artist’s oeuvre, the coherence
of this new type of film-making. It is work that transcends the boundaries of image to enter an in-between space.
In a manner similar to that characterising this film of Jean-Christian Bourcart, the programme will display on
the wide screen a series of diverse experiences and conversations. Taking advantage of a year of transition, the
Galerie VU’ thus subtly questions the exalting, always mysterious relationship we enjoy with respect to the image.
Exhibition venue: cinéma du Méjan.
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AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL, THE RIGHT TO KNOW
1961-2011: AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL AND PHOTOGRAPHERS
For fifty years now Amnesty International has been calling attention to violence all over the world. In its reports
and statements it has denounced the violations of human rights that are a daily occurrence, and the result has
been increased public awareness and citizen mobilisation around the world: heads of state, governments and
decision-makers have repeatedly been confronted with their responsibilities. In their commitment to the defence
of human rights Amnesty International activists share the capacity for indignation that motivated the earliest
campaigns of the organisation founded by Peter Benenson. Outraged by the jailing of two Portuguese students
who had dared to drink a toast to freedom during the Salazar dictatorship, on 28 May 1961 this London lawyer
published a first call to action on behalf of six prisoners of conscience, in The Observer. To inform, publicise,
ward off oblivion and establish the facts as impartially as possible: these remain the driving forces for a movement
that quickly took on international proportions. If Amnesty International has chosen to associate itself with leading
names in the photojournalism field, it is not so much to ‘celebrate’ its fiftieth anniversary as to gauge what this
half-century of struggle and mobilisation has meant, to take an objective look at the organisation’s commitments
past and to come, and to make clear what is at stake. The point, then, is not to illustrate AI’s activities, but to
explore the way photographic styles converge and complement each other, and so highlight the abuses to be
combated in a complex world that Amnesty International condemns and photographers chronicle. Some of these
images may shock. Indignation is often the first step towards a purely personal commitment which later involves
others and turns ‘lost causes’ into victories. This is the firm belief of Amnesty International, which, fifty years after
its founding, now counts some three million members united by the conviction that defending human rights is
everybody’s business and calls for the mobilisation of all.
www.amnesty.fr
Introduction by Pauline David and Pierre Huault (Amnesty International).
Texts and lecture by Michel Christolhomme.
53
ARLES IN SUMMER
ARLES PERFORMANCES AND FESTIVALS
3 July
FESTIVAL OF COSTUMES
A parade of costumed Arlesians at the Théâtre Antique.
From the place de la République to the Théâtre Antique.
4 July
COCARDE D’OR
A leading ‘bull run’ in Arles.
Arènes d’Arles.
4-9 July
VOIES OFF FESTIVAL
The festival displays the works of young photographers.
Cour de l’Archevêché, place de la République.
11-17 July
LES SUDS
A huge party is held in every corner of the city.
Théâtre Antique, Cour de l’Archevêché et autres.
19-22 July
LES ESCALES DU CARGO
Established artists and new talents gather in Arles for this festival.
Théâtre Antique
28 July-11 August
LES ENVIES RHÔNEMENTS
Art and science, nature and culture: this is what Les Envies Rhônements deals with.
21-28 August
XXIIIRD ARELATE FESTIVAL
The festival draws its inspiration from the Roman origins of Arles.
22-26 August
PEPLUM MOVIES FESTIVAL
A unique chance to see once again those forgotten movies.
9-11 September
RICE HARVEST FESTIVAL
Rootes in Arles’ age-old bull culture, the ‘Feria du Riz’ takes over the city-centre streets.
17-18 September
JOURNÉES EUROPÉENNES DU PATRIMOINE
Exhibitions, concerts, guided tours, there will be plenty for each and every one of us.
EXHIBITIONS IN ARLES
1-31 July
HARIS DIAMANTIDIS
The community association Thalassinos, dedicated to culture in all its forms, presents Errance with Haris
Diamantidis, winner of the first prize for travel photography at the Rencontres d’Arles in 1981.
20 rue de l’Hôtel de Ville, 2 and 34 rue de la République <www.harisdiamandis.com>
1 July–18 September
CHARLOTTE CHARBONNEL
Working on the boundary between science and art, Charlotte Charbonnel offers innovative installations whose
mix of video, sculpture and sound supplements aesthetics with mechanics, electronics and IT. Closed Mondays.
Musée Réattu.
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1 July –18 September
IAN ABELA « ESPRIT HAUTE COUTURE »
Photographe professionnel depuis plus de dix ans, Ian Abela s’est spécialisé dans la photographie de mode et de
beauté. Il a fait campagne dans le monde entier et le voici qui présente son travail sur la Haute Couture à Arles.
Barreme, 3 rue Barreme.
2 – 24 July
SERGE ASSIER
Serge Assier presents, this time, his work on the city of Marseille, a preview of the future European Capital of
Culture in 2013. This exhibition is a commission for the Transport company of Marseille.
Maison de la vie Associative d’Arles, 2 boulevard des Lices.
PORTRAIT
Five artists offer their point of view on mankind and on the city using different techniques, all linked to photography :
Matthias Olmeta Ambrotypes, Guillaume Chamahian Film-photographique, Reeve Schumacher Dessins /
Polaroïds / Tableaux, M Lafille Vidéo, Lucy Luce Jewelry.
Galerie L’HOSTE art contemporain, 7 rue de l’Hoste.
2 July-2 October
YOUNG PHOTOGRAPHERS: ON THE COUNTERTOP An exhibition and a screening. Sabine Delcour and Sophie Zénon présent seven young photographers, Audrey
Armand, Marie Maurel de Maillé, Julie Pradier, Emilie Reynaud, Marie Sommer, Stéphanie Tétu, Emilie Vialet, working
on a collective project with the help of Jane-Evelyn Atwood, Michael Kenna, Bernard Plossu, John Davies...
2 rue Jouvène, place Honoré Clair <www.atraverslepaysage.com>
3–24 July
ATELIER ARCHIPEL EN ARLES
This exhibition presents work by Laura Jonneskindt, including her Espace vital project, and Marc Limousin,
notably the photo installations of Ondes de rives.
8 rue des douaniers.
4–10 July
NICOLAS LEBLANC, BORN SOMEWHERE
These photographs by young artist Nicolas Leblanc signal his opposition to social exclusion and forced migration,
and his interest in the lives of people of modest means.
Maison-Galerie L’atelier du midi, 1 rue du Sauvage.
4–10 July
ARLESIAN ‘FULGURANCES’
Fulgurances has created six ‘Mystery Dinners’ at a secret venue. Guests will meet at 8.00pm at the Magasin de
Jouets; from there they will be guided to their secret soirée.
Musée Réattu.
4–13 July
SOROPTIMIST, THE CHILD FROM ZERO TO TEN
The exhibition will include a competition and is supported by the Global Action for Childhood programm. These
will be officially awarded in the presence of a judging panel of professional photographers and personalities.
Arles Women’s Association, place du Sauvage.
4–31 July
ASPHODELE « ARLES/VIEWS »
The Asphodèle association, in its project Space for Art presents photographies taken by great artists who have
been in Arles during the last years (Antoni Muntadas, Joan Fontcuberta, Bernard Plossu, Philippe Durand, Manuel
Alvarez Bravo, Corinne Mercadier and many others...).
5 rue Réattu.
GALERIE HUIT
The gallery is presenting four exhibitions: Photography Open Salon 2011—Transience; Bordello by Vee Spears;
Solitary by Vanja Karas, L’Été dangereux by Jean-Claude Sauer.
Galerie Huit, 8 rue de la Calade.
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4 July – 18 September
OPEN AIR GALLERY
Taken by Emmanuel Bénard and local residents as part of the CUCS workshops organised by the City of Arles
Cultural Affairs Department in association with SEMPA, these photographs point up the way people see their
locality.
On the walls in the Griffeuille neighbourhood
MICHAEL ROBERTS « SHOT IN SICILY » AND « GALERIE HUIT OPEN SALON »
Shot in Sicily gives us Michael Roberts’ point of view on Sicily, its men, tradition, landscapes, through the prism
of his eye, as a photographer and fashion amateur. This show presents 20 years of work and the changes in his
way of looking at the universes, both sensual and ambiguous.
Galerie Huit, 8 rue de la Calade.
4 June–18 September
WANG ZHIPPING
This exhibition presents 100 piaces of the artist’s work on the aftermath of Tiananmen.
5 rue Vernon.
5–8 July
AUCTION
Auction sale of photographs, all proceeds to the Cinematheque in Tangier.
Garage of the Grand Hotel Nord-Pinus, rue du Docteur Fanton.
ERIK NUSSBICKER
In the desecrated Montmajour abbey, Erik Nussbicker excavates through his art the latente sacredness of the place.
Un giant hourglass made of silk, as high as the building, hosts thousands of flies that fly and go back in time...
Abbaye de Montmajour, Route de Fontvieille.
JORDI CUXART « HOMMAGE TO GAUDI AND JUJOL »
Jordi Cuxart, exhibited in 2009, présents this time his work of Gaudi and Jujol in Barcelona. Both architects, born
in the end of the 19th century, have changed Spanish architecture considerably. Their work became what is called
‘‘Catalan modernism’’ or ‘‘Catalan architectural rebirth’’, being compared to Le Corbusier or Mallet Stevens’ one.
Galerie Circa, 2 Rue de la Roquette.
ENTREVUES
The Fetart association and Gens d’Images présent the co-laureates of the second édition of ‘Entrevues ’, the european
photography compétition: Maia Flore et Adrian Woods. Opening night on the Wednesday 6th of July at 18 pm.
Magasin de jouets, 19 Rue Jouvène <www.fetart.org>
7 July
ARTCOURTVIDÉO / LABO
ArtcourtVidéo, the video shorts festival in Arles is showing a selection of shorts in association with the Sauve Qui
Peut le Court festival in Clermont-Ferrand. The screening will be part of La Roquette Night, from 10 pm to 2 am.
The actual festival will run from 17–23 October 2011.
Quartier de la Roquette, Arles <www.artcourtvideo.com>
7 July-17 August
APART—FESTIVAL OF CONTEMPORARY ART
This year the festival will take place over six weeks, with more than 50 artists: site-specific works, performances,
residencies, workshops, debates.
Les Alpilles <http://www.festival-apart.com>
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EVENTS IN THE AREA
12 June-2 October
CY TWOMBLY PHOTOGRAPHER, FRIENDS AND OTHERS
Known for his pictural works and his sculptures, Cy Twombly is less known for his photographic activity that has
been going on for 60 years.
Collection Lambert en Avignon et Chapelle du Méjan, Arles.
8 April-18 September
DEGAS, BONNARD, VUILLARD
The three painters use cameras to create images, as early as 1895, to picture their relatives and to take advantage
of what is only a technique to the eyes of others.
Musée Angladon en Avignon.
25 June-14 November
SUMPTUOUS EGYPT
The city of Arles presents the exhibition Sumptuous Egypt for the bicentenary of the opening of the Musée Calvet.
It emphasizes the richness of the museum’s collection which was first gathered by Esprit Calvet (1728-1810), a
doctor and scholar from Avignon.
Musée Angladon en Avignon.
4 December 2010-25 September 2011
BRIDGES
For the very first time, a theme exhibition which pays tribute to the bridges in the most famous monuments of
Avignon. Forty leading contemporary artists have joined the original idea and will be displaying their vision, their
idea, their image of the bridges, whether imaginary or real, philosophical or spiritual, poetic or figurative.
Palais des Papes en Avignon.
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INFORMATION
EXHIBITIONS AND GUIDED TOURS
Exhibitions: 4 July – 18 September (Some venues in central Arles close on the 20th of August, 2nd of September
and 4th of September).
The Rencontres d’Arles are fully bilingual (French/English).
Opening hours : 10am - 7pm
The catalogue will be available in July (jointly published by the Rencontres d’Arles and Actes Sud in French and
English).
Guided tours of the exhibitions led by photographers and creators (4–10 July) and by liaison officers all summer
(11 July-18 September).
They are free for the holders of the pass and the people of Arles, the ones under 18 years old, the ones that
benefit from the RSA/ASS/AAH and the handicapped.
Two different routes : 3 pm City center (Place de la République) and 5 pm Parc des ateliers (Atelier de Maintenance).
One route from the 5th to the 18th of September: Parc des ateliers.
Information and bookings at the Welcome desk: 34 Rue du Docteur Fanton in Arles.
Groups: the Rencontres d’Arles offer discounts for groups over 10 people and guided tours with liaison officers
in english and french (other languages might be possible).
Contact: Sandrine Imbert / [email protected]/ + 33 (0)4 90 96 63 39
OPENING WEEK
4-10 July
Evening screenings at the Roman Theatre: 5, 6, 7 and 9 July, 10:15pm.
Night of the Year: City Center, 8 July in the Arenas.
Rencontres d’Arles Awards: prizegiving ceremony evening on the 9th of July, at theThéâtre Antique.
Talks, discussions, book signings throughout the opening week at 34 Rue du Docteur Fanton.
The Rencontres d’Arles Village: 4-10 July - Parc des Ateliers
Symposium: 6-8 July - Théâtre d’Arles.
Seminar: 10-12 July - Théâtre d’Arles.
Photo Folio Review: 4-10 July
INFORMATION
Consult the Rencontres d’Arles programme on www.rencontres-arles.com
Welcome desks: Place de la République, Parc des Ateliers, Espace Van Gogh.
Parking and refreshments in the Parc des Ateliers.
60
ARLES, HOW TO GET THERE?
By road
From Paris: freeway A7/A9/A54, exit Arles Centre
From Italy: freeway A7 then A54, exit Arles Centre
From Spain: freeway A9 then A54, exit Arles Centre
By train
www.voyages-sncf.com
Tel. (+ 33) 36 35
TGV Paris-Arles: 4 hours
TGV Paris-Avignon + connection to Arles: 2h40 + 40 min.
By bus
Regular services to and from Marseille, Nîmes, Avignon
By plane
Nîmes airport: 25 km
Marseille-Provence airport: 65 km
Avignon airport: 35 km
RENCONTRES D’ARLES WELCOME DESKS
The Welcome Desk provides information and accreditation for the press, exhibiting artists and professionals.
It is situated at 34 Rue du Docteur Fanton, just a few steps from the Place du Forum.
PRESS OFFICE
Claudine Colin Communication
Contact : Constance Gounod
Situated at the Welcome Desk. The press office is open from 4 – 10 July, from 10:00am – 7:00pm.
PRESS ACCREDITATION
Accreditation is strictly limited to journalists covering the festival.
Claudine Colin Communication
Constance Gounod
28 rue de Sévigné – 75004 Paris
Tel : + 33 (0)1 42 72 60 01 – Fax : + 33 (0)1 42 72 50 23
e-mail : [email protected]
Press accreditation is non-transferable and provides access to all exhibitions and events for the opening week
only (4 – 10 July). For the remainder of the summer, a further request must be made to the press office.
Accreditation can be picked up from Monday 4 July at the festival office, 34 rue du Docteur Fanton.
All information regarding the above can also be found on www.rencontres-arles.com.
61
PRIVATE
PARTNERS
SFR, RENCONTRES D’ARLES PARTNER
SFR reaffirms their support for contemporary creative photography—particularly for up-and-coming
photographers—with their 7 th consecutive annual exhibition at the SFR Young Talent Gallery in Arles (la
Galerie SFR Jeunes Talents). Six artists have been selected by juries of professionals.
‘SFR Young Talent’ was set up in 2006 and offers a wide-ranging programme of support for people involved in
the arts, in sport, and in business. The ‘SFR Young Talent’ programme acts as a springboard for them all. It seeks
to promote an idea, a project or a vocation and help them through the key steps. SFR gives advice to the Young
Talents, helping them gain access to a network of professionals and experts in each field and at the same time
giving them access to the best theatres, exhibitions and competitions. Several photo competitions are organised
throughout the year in partnership with the most prestigious art institutions (e.g. Paris Photo, The Rencontres
d’Arles, MAP, lille 3000, Galerie Polka) and with the blessing of such famous patrons as Reza, Isabel Muñoz and
Patrick Tournebœuf.
SFR YOUNG TALENT GALLERY
Couvent Saint-Césaire, rue du Grand Couvent, Arles.
The gallery is displaying the work of six photographers from the SFR Young Talent programme:
- SFR Young Photo Talent 2011.
- The prize-winners of SFR Young Photo Talent / Rencontres d’Arles 2011.
Open: 4 July - 28 August, 10 am – 7 pm every day.
Free entry.
PATRICK TOURNEBŒUF, WORLD-FAMOUS PATRON
Photographer Patrick Tournebœuf is patron of the SFR Young Photo Talents Prize, 2011. For the occasion, Patrick
Tournebœuf exhibits five photos illustrating his own artistic background, at the Galerie SFR Jeunes Talents, Arles
SFR YOUNG PHOTO TALENTS PRIZE, 2011
The SFR Young Photo Talent Prize, 2011 is awarded to the best prize-winner of all the competitions in the year.
An artistic project is selected, which SFR then promotes throughout the year by means of exhibitions, funding in
the form of scholarships, purchases of work, and publication of a portfolio monograph in the SFR Young Talent
collection. The jury, comprising photographer Patrick Tournebœuf (president of the jury), Marloes Krijnen (director
of the Amsterdam Photography Museum), Michel Puech (www.lalettredelaphotographie.com), Alain Mingam
(exhibition curator) and the SFR Young Talent team, chose the winner: Marin Hock.
SFR YOUNG PHOTO TALENTS / RENCONTRES D’ARLES COMPETITION, 2011
The SFR Young Photo Talents / Rencontres d’Arles Competition, 2011 was launched on sfrjeunestalents.fr with
the theme ‘South of the Gaze’. Under the patronage of Patrick Tournebœuf, François Hébel (director of the
Rencontres d’Arles) presided over a jury composed of Alain Mingam (exhibition curator) and Clément
Chéroux (curator for photography, Centre Pompidou—Musée national d’art moderne).
They chose five winners: Françoise Beauguion, Aurélie Durand, Claire Delfino, Jean-Pierre Dastugue, Léo
Delafontaine (prix du public).
Introduce yourself. Sign up to ‘SFR Young Talent’ on www.sfrjeunestalents.fr
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LUMA FOUNDATION, EXCLUSIVE PARTNER OF THE RENCONTRES D’ARLES PRIZE
The Discovery Award
For ten years the LUMA Foundation has been underwriting Rencontres d’Arles through the Discovery Award,
which rewards a photographer, or an artist using photography, whose work has been recently discovered or is
worthy of note in the international arena. Each photographer presents his or her work via a personal exhibition
in the Parc des Ateliers. The judging takes place through a public voting process during the trade days (journées
professionnelles). The award is 25,000 euros. The LUMA Foundation also supports publishing, with the Historical
Book Award and the Contemporary Book Award, rewarding a book of historical photography and one by a contemporary artst, each with a grant of 8,000 euros.
LUMA Arles—Summer program
In July LUMA Foundation continues its summer programme, foreshadowing LUMA Arles and the Parc des Ateliers,
with the collaboration of Rencontres d’Arles, through a series of exhibitions and events: Trisha Donnelly’s installation
in the church of Saint-Honorat-des-Alyscamps, curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Beatrix Ruf. Exhibition open
until August 29, 2011.
The LUMA Prize
Founded in 2010 and first awarded by Fischli / Weiss, the LUMA Prize is awarded each year to an artist selected
by one or several internationally renowned peers. This prize is 25,000 euros. In Arles, 2010 prize-winner Trisha
Donnelly will present the 2011 LUMA Prize to one of a pre-selected list of ten artists nominated by the Core Group
of LUMA Foundation, made up of Tom Eccles, Liam Gillick, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Philippe Parreno and Beatrix Ruf.
These artists will be featured in a book handed out free of charge during the colloquium, the opening week and
over the full run of the Rencontres.
LUMA Foundation
LUMA, a non-profit foundation, supports independent artists and artistic pioneers, helping them to create or bring
to term projects in the fields of art, images, publishing, documentaries and multimedia. It deepens and develops
expertise in large-scale, innovative projects integrating education, culture and the environment, thus creating
favourable conditions for a fruitful dialogue between domains that might have trouble communicating otherwise.
In the context of its stated mission LUMA Foundation underwrites institutions supporting contemporary art in
Switzerland and throughout the world, such as the Kunsthalle Zürich and the New Museum of Contemporary
Art in New York. Since 2005 it has also financed exhibitions and initiatives organized by the Basel Kunsthalle,
the Berlin Kunsthalle, the Wintherthur Fotomuseum, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Venice Biennale, as well as
Artangel and the Serpentine Gallery in London. What is more, the LUMA Foundation assists in the presentation
of works by well-known artists such as Doug Aitken, Douglas Gordon, Philippe Parreno, Wolfgang Tillmans and
Olafur Eliasson; it also participates in philanthropic and ecological research, including the projects of Human
Rights Watch in New York.
In Arles, a world capital of photography, the foundation plans to build or rehabilitate several buildings within a
public park for a cultural site dedicated specifically to images both moving and still. This vast project is designed
by Frank Gehry, who participates both in the conceptualization of the Foundation’s buildings, and through his
role as project director. The project is being realized with the support of the municipal government of Arles, the
Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur Region, and the French Culture and Communications Ministry, as well as with the
help of an ever-increasing number of independent initiatives.
64
AN ONGOING BATTLE FOR PHOTOGRAPHY
It’s 2011 and the Rencontres d’Arles are back. This major photography event continues to go from success to
success, but this should not blind us to the difficulties its survival poses for organisers and backers alike. The
same difficulties that face every serious photography event.
For two years, and even more so this time round, we’ve seen the obstacles piling up. Given the political and
economic climate, the tensions and contradictory aims, only absolute determination combined with agreement
among all concerned can make sure we avoid the pitfalls.
Every year I note and share the problems and doubts the Rencontres team has to deal with in setting up the
programme and balancing the budget. Right up until the last minute. Since François Hébel took the helm again
ten years ago—and now with the wholehearted backing of president Jean-Noël Jeanneney—success has been
unfailing. But at what a cost!
Every year both public and private partners have to bite the bullet: Are we going to be able to find the money?
Is this spending compatible with our aims and responsibilities? What events should we back? The Rencontres
d’Arles—of course!—but what about the others? How, in spite of everything, are we to keep on backing the
photographers without whom none of this would be possible?
These are the questions we are doing our best to answer. And this year, once more, we’ve found the resources for
being in there with the photographers and backing the Rencontres.
Let there be no doubt, that Arles magic will work again in 2011.
Faith in Arles will move mountains.
We will be delighted to see you again this year at the new ‘Olympus’ Rencontres, in the familiar setting of the
Arlatan gardens. Be our guest for displays of the latest innovations and our special photographic events.
Didier Quilain, President, OLYMPUS France, Director of the OLYMPUS Region France / Belgium / Luxemburg.
Events, institutions and photographers supported by Olympus:
The Rencontres d’Arles, the Jeu de Paume Museum, the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, the Nicéphore Niépce
Museum, the National School of Photography in Arles, Photo Phnom Pen.
Jean-Christian Bourcart, Sarah Caron, Françoise Huguier, Laurence Leblanc, Richard Pak, Denis Rouvre, the
Tendance Floue collective, Paolo Woods, Kimiko Yoshida.
65
FNAC SUPPORTS YOUNG PHOTOGRAPHERS
Photography and the Fnac have a long history of friendship, going back to the brand’s first days in 1954, and its
Photo-Film Club. A partner of Rencontres d’Arles since the festival’s creation in 1969, the Fnac every summer
conveys its passion for photography through this must-see event, ceaselessly innovating in order to offer young
artists a springboard commensurate with their talent. For the third consecutive year the Fnac partners with Photo
Folio Review to offer young artists a chance to expose their work to the eyes of international photography experts
(editors, exhibition curators, agency directors, gallery owners, collectors, critics…) and to benefit from their
counsel. These experts, in collaboration with Rencontres d’Arles and the Fnac, will select five ‘instant favourites’
among photographers participating in the Photo Folio Review. The Fnac will exhibit their work in its photography
galleries following the festival, and the winner’s work will be shown at Rencontres d’Arles—this year, the work of
Augustin Rebetez (winner for 2010) will be featured.
With this new event the Fnac reaffirms its support for a new generation of photographers, and renews
its friendship with Rencontres d’Arles.
THE LAUREATES OF THE PHOTO FOLIO REVIEW & GALLERY 2010
Andrea Star Reese (US), Jeroen Hofman (the Netherlands), Bruno Quinquet (Japan), Anna Skladmann
(Germany), Augustin Rebetez (Switzerland).
66
BMW, PARTNERING EVERY KIND OF PHOTOGRAPHY
BMW is proud to be backing the legendary Rencontres d’Arles for the second year running.
Photography and the automobile are linked by an exceptionally rich shared history. In the twentieth century both
saw the advent of mass production, the rise of worldwide brands and, from the 1950s on, an increasingly broad
social spread. The upheavals of the early twenty-first century led to a new awareness of declining oil stocks which
forced manufacturers to seek alternatives to the internal combustion engine. BMW is now at the cutting edge with
its hydrogen and electric engines. Photography has seen the digital age bring radical change after a hundred and
fifty years of film. In spite of their well-rooted history, the automobile industry and photography both face major
challenges if they are to continue on those paths that have brought pleasure and excitement to so many. It was a
natural decision for BMW France to make a commitment to photography—a long-term involvement that began
in 2003 with Paris Photo.
The BMW Paris Photo Prize was established in 2004 and, over the last seven years, has become an emblem
of excellence. Last year’s prize was won by Hungarian photographer Gábor Ösz, represented by the Galerie
Loevenbruck in Paris. His work, Permanent Daylight (2004) impressed the jury, which included the historian Michel
Frizot, who commented: ‘Gábor Ösz’s work represents a break with certain current standards. The originality of it,
along with its slow and unpretentious execution, struck us as being in perfect harmony with the theme, Electric Vision’.
BMW France President Philippe Dehennin is enthusiastic: ‘I see BMW’s commitment to photography as a marvellous
example of the affinities between an art form and a company that are both dedicated to aesthetic purity and
technological challenge. Since 2003 BMW has sponsored creative photography. 2011 puts the seal of friendship
on an association with the Rencontres d’Arles which, I trust, will prove long and fruitful’.
2011: THE STATIONS FOLLOW THE RENCONTRES D’ARLES’ RHYTHM
The stations of Paris–Gare de Lyon, Avignon TGV, Montpellier, Nîmes, Marseille Saint-Charles and Arles will be
animated Rencontres d’Arles outlets from 4 July to 18 September.
For the second year in a row travellers will be given the chance to see the work of famous photographers and
enjoy all sorts of imaginative photography events. An added extra this year will be a competition open to all station
users and passers-by: take the best photo of this year’s Rencontres mascot, the mighty zebu, who’s moving into
all the participating stations.
2011: A smash hit in the stations
During the 42 nd Rencontres travellers were moved, amused and astonished by the works on show, which really
made the most of some great architectural settings. As places for going places, stations are maybe the best spots
around for getting away from it all and delighting in light, with a helping hand from photography.
The station becomes a core element of any city out to give culture its broadest possible scope, Sophie Boissard,
Managing director, Gares & Connexions.
68
ARTE PHOTOGRAPHS FASHION
Arte, the cultural TV channel makes a point of its commitment to photography.
Every Sunday the series l’Art et la Manière (‘The Way to Do it’) takes us into the world and the work of contemporary
artists, often photographers. Throughout the year the programming includes documentaries on the history of
photography. And Actions Culturelles d’ARTE, our outreach programme, has never been slow to rub shoulders
with photographic talent.
This year, with its street fashion competition Fashion and the City, Actions Culturelles has brought to light thirty
young creative talents. Three photographers with the Vu’ Agency, Claudine Doury, Paolo Verzone and Steeve
Iuncker have immortalised the fashion passion of this generation for our channel.
Arte will be displaying all the photographs on Night of the Year at the Rencontres d’Arles.
Press Contact:
Grégoire Mauban
00 33 (0)1 55 00 70
[email protected]
69
The SAIF is a French not-for-profit membership organisation whose purpose is to safeguard the interests of
authors in the visual arts and to collect and distribute certain royalties for them. Of the 4,800 authors represented
by the SAIF in France, more than 3,200 are photographers.
The author-members of the SAIF are collective owners of their organisation (with a share of 15,24 per author) and
are democratically involved in the decisions of the AGM (one share = one vote).
Membership of the SAIF entitles authors to ‘collective’ rights.
‘Collective’ rights are monies due by law that have to be administered by an authors’ collecting society. They apply
to all photographers who have images published in books or the press, on the Internet or on television.
At present, there are four collective rights:
-private audiovisual or digital copying levies: authors are paid for audiovisual or digital copies made by the
public for their own private use 25% of this money is devoted to cultural activities such as sponsorship of
festivals
-duplication rights: payment for photocopying of works published in books or the press
-repeat transmission by cable: payment for payment for repeat transmission of television programmes via cable
networks
-public lending rights: payment for the loan of books in libraries.
Since 2007 and as a result of agreements with the French Ministry of Education, the SAIF also administers
payments made for the pedagogical use of authors’ works.
The SAIF collects your royalties:
From television stations and from Internet sites and portals.
It also collects resale royalties or droits de suite—i.e. payment for public resale of original prints in auction rooms
and galleries. It will also collect, if asked, public display royalties (for exhibitions) and reproduction royalties (for
example, in the press, in books, on cards, and on posters).
The SAIF works to safeguard and improve the protection of authors’ rights.
To this end, the SAIF works with national and international organisations, such as the French Ministry of Culture,
the French parliament, the CSPLA (French Council for Literary and Artistic Property), and the European Union,
towards collective protection of photographers’ rights.
Photographers, join the saif in order to protect your rights!
SAIF
121, rue Vieille du Temple
75003 Paris
00 33 (0)1 44 61 07 82
[email protected]
www.saif.fr
70
THE RENCONTRES D’ARLES ON LCI INTERNET TV
LCI is the channel that offers real-time news plus commentary and analysis by top names in the field.
Concerts, films, exhibitions, festivals—for 17 years LCI has been backing culture in all its many forms through a
committed partnership policy.
To highlight, chronicle and challenge—these are the shared missions of news and photography.
So naturally LCI the news channel is proud to be associated with this 42 nd Rencontres d’Arles.
Keep tabs on this major cultural event all summer on LCI and TF1News.fr
71
FRANCE INTER LIVE FROM ARLES
Every summer, France Inter does the round of the festivals. Coverage is live and our listeners experience all the
diversity, the immediacy and the richness of these summer events. Since 2006 France Inter have shown their
commitment and their interest in the Rencontres Photographiques d’Arles, the photographic festival that they
have officially partnered since 2009. The exhibitions, exchanges, and discussions at the Rencontres d’Arles range
from traditional photography to advertising, from photo-journalism to portraits, exploring in all their fascinating
variety the forms and issues of photography today.
Listen to France Inter in Arles on 91.3
The 6 th and the 7 th of July, starting at 6 pm, France Inter and Laurence Peuron will be devoting Le magazine
culturel to artists and all the big figures on the summer culture scene.
Press Contact / Marion Glémet: 00 33 (0)1 56 40 26 47 / [email protected]
FRANCE CULTURE AND THE RENCONTRES D’ARLES 2011
Creative work in all its forms is presented and talked about on France Culture, so photography has its natural place
there, too. Several programmes regularly touch on the subject and explore its contours. The world of culture and
ideas is our staple at France Culture and we use all the different radio genres to bring it to you—fiction, creative
documentaries, magazine programmes, studio discussions, and more.
Find out, listen www.franceculture.com
As usual, France Culture will be in Arles broadcasting live for the public :
Thursday, the 7 th of July, live in public, 12 am to 1.30 pm: La Grande Table with Caroline Broué and Hervé Gardette.
Monday to friday, from 12 am to 1.30 pm, gather around culture! No exclusive. Everything that is done, everyone
that has done it, today’s culture gather around our Grande Table. La Grande Table, another way to look at the
world, through culture’s eyes.
Contact
Public Relations Director / Caroline Cesbron
00 33 (0)1 56 40 23 40 and 00 33 (0)6 22 17 34 46
Press relations / Adrien Landivier
00 33 (0)1 56 40 21 40 and 00 33 (0)6 11 97 37 85
Partnerships / Gaëlle Michel
00 33 (0)1 56 40 12 45 and 00 33 (0)6 01 01 28 51
72
Convinced of the need to promote dialogue between the world of culture and that of the economy, Rencontres
d’Arles in 2009 created their Sponsors’ Circle, the principal goal of which is to turn company directors into
‘ambassadors’ for the festival. Its mission is thus to bring together local businesses with an interest
in photography and a strong commitment to the development of their region, in order to:
- Promote the industrial texture of the Arles and Provence areas and develop regional, national and international
synergies.
- Weave efficient links between participating companies.
- Suggest to companies that they link the image of Rencontres d’Arles to their own commercial and promotional
programmes. Rencontres d’Arles implies notions of creativity, excellence, experimentation and renewal, values
that are also held dear by corporate executives.
- Include all of a company’s workforce and collaborators in this cultural outlet: develop internal relationships
with Rencontres and mobilize the workforce through introductory events focused on photography, a constantly
changing and widely popular discipline.
Rencontres d’Arles are very happy to announce membership of these enterprises in the Sponsors’ Circle:
Founded in 1978, the Actes Sud publishing house is remarkable not only for having it headquarters in the provinces,
but also for its distinctive graphic identity—format, paper, cover illustrations—and its receptiveness to literature
in other languages. Based in Arles since 1983, Actes Sud continues to thrive while asserting its independence,
spirit of discovery and outreach. From the outset the emphasis has been on literature, but this does not exclude
numerous other fields of knowledge and disciplines including photography, art, nature, theatre, poetry, music
and philosophy. The catalogue now extends to over 6000 titles. In 2004 Actes Sud relaunched the Photo Poche
series. Photofile, as this small-format landmark venture is called in English, combines meticulous printing, handy
size and prices accessible to all lovers of an art form that has now received the acceptance it deserves. The
series’ different categories—history, society, etc.—cover all fields of photography and cumulatively represent a
remarkably rich and varied collection of images. ‘What pleases’ and ‘what’s needed’: these are the watchwords of
a publishing house whose aim has always been to foster the creativity of all those involved in their undertaking,
while doing everything possible to promote emergence and recognition for new talent, via, for example, the
European Photography Publishers Award.
Listel is proud to show its support for the Rencontres d’Arles by becoming a member of the Circle of Sponsors.
Patronage as a corporate commitment can be traced back to the origins of Société Ricard. Its founder, Paul
Ricard, was a groundbreaking donor in diverse areas, such as culture and the environment. Ricard today is a
national company involved long-term in various sponsorship fields: scientific sponsorship through the Paul Ricard
Oceanographic Institute, initiatives favouring environmental causes and regional traditions with the Paul Ricard
de Méjanes domaine in Camargue and the Clubs Taurins Paul Ricard; and finally, cultural sponsorships through
the Ricard Company Foundation and Ricard SA Live Music. The Ricard company, as a partner in numerous
cultural events, continues to promote artistic creation. Its commitment to Rencontres d’Arles forms part of its
drive to promote creativity and support actors on the cultural stage, paying particular attention to events taking
place on the company’s home turf, the south of France.
Dominique Perron
73
Created in September, 2007, la Feria du Pain, a baker / patissier, snack shop and caterer is a typically artisanal
enterprise. Located near the Parc des Ateliers, we wanted to found a local business in this dynamic and expanding
neighbourhood that would not only offer traditional products but also a spectrum of speciality products ranging
from ‘toro’ sausage bread, to butter and sugar ‘sablé’ biscuits, to ‘nougatine’ sweets flavoured with Camargue
sea salt. Given our location and the image that Rencontres d’Arles projects throughout the world, we wished to
become part of the Rencontres Sponsors’ Circle to support and help at our own level (cocktails, sandwiches,
etc.) a well-known enterprise—and allow our own entourage to benefit from the cultural outlets made possible
by Rencontres d’Arles.
Claire and Serge Gilly
The work of SB Conseil, a cultural engineering firm, consists primarily of defining sponsorship strategies, searching
for private investment and creating sponsorship circles based on major events and on cultural institutions (such
as Festival d’Avignon, the Lyon Biennales, the Paris Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the Rencontres Internationales de
la Photographie d’Arles, and the Spectacles of the Château de Versailles). The aim of SB Conseil is to help develop
projects and experiences that reinforce local partnerships on their home ground. SB Conseil’s commitment to
Rencontres d’Arles is generated in part by the high quality of the festival’s programme and also by the fact that it
works in tandem with Rencontres leaders in discovering artists.
This commitment is also linked to the great variety of businesses and executives involved in the Circle, all of whom
are strongly rooted in Arles and in a festival which constitutes in itself an extraordinary channel for propagating
information about the Arles region. Finally, we are also motivated by the idea of coming together several times a
year in a spirit of great conviviality.
Crédit Coopératif is a partner of Rencontres d’Arles.
For many years it has been deeply involved with both cultural groups and businesses; a number of these have chosen
it as a partner bank in all segments of the sector: performance arts—theatre, music, dance, street performance,
circus—or other disciplines such as plastic arts, museums, publishing… To respond to these needs Crédit Coopératif
has developed, on top of its standard banking services, solutions adapted to the particular requirements they have
for financing production, investing and varied investment products. For further information on Crédit Coopératif:
www.credit-cooperatif.coop
By associating itself with projects in the cultural, humanitarian and sporting arenas, Air France facilitates their
development in France and throughout the world. Air France prioritizes innovative cultural and sports projects that
embody the French heritage, the values of which mesh with its own branding. It also favours partnerships allowing
the participation of the greatest possible number of its own investors, clients, privileged partners (including
travel agents) and collaborators (for in-house events). In a highly competitive environment these year-round
public relations initiatives constitute an indispensable tool for mobilizing and enhancing brand loyalty, for
maintaining a direct link to its most important clients, and for stimulating its sales force.
Born over thirty years ago in the heart of Provence, the syrups of Moulin de Valdonne draw their character and
incomparable quality from a generous and authentic countryside. Rich and flavourful thanks to the fine taste
of their component fruits, and through research into creating products imbued with naturalness, Moulin
de Valdonne’s products represent an alliance of tradition and modernity. Moulin de Valdonne and the Festival
des Rencontres d’Arles share numerous values. They are linked by their common origins in Provence,
as well as by their care to maintain a rich, relevant heritage while continuing to innovate their product line.
Already committed to supporting varied cultural events, Moulin de Valdonne joins the Sponsorship Circle
of Rencontres d’Arles to play its part in promoting a unique and exceptional festival of creativity and joy.
74
RENCONTRES D’ARLES BOARD OF DIRECTORS
COMMITTEE
Jean-Noël Jeanneney / President
Hervé Schiavetti / Vice-president
Jean-François Dubos / Vice-president
Maja Hoffmann / Treasurer
Françoise Nyssen / Secretary
FOUNDING MEMBERS
Lucien Clergue, Jean-Maurice Rouquette
HONORARY MEMBERS
City of Arles
Hervé Schiavetti / Mayor of Arles, Vice-president of the Bouches-du-Rhône Department Council
Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur Region
Michel Vauzelle / President of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur Region, Member of Parliament
Bouches-du-Rhône Department Council
Jean-Noël Guérini / President of the Bouches-du-Rhône Department Council, Member of the Senate
Ministry of Culture and Communications
Jean-Pierre Simon / Deputy Director of Visual Arts
General Directorate of Artistic Creation
François Brouat / Regional Director of Cultural Affairs
Institut Français
Sylviane Tarsot-Gillery / Director
École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie, Arles
Rémy Fenzy / Director
Centre des Monuments Nationaux
Isabelle Lemesle / President
QUALIFIED MEMBERS OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY
Maryse Cordesse, Patrick de Carolis, Catherine Lamour, Michèle Moutashar, Jean-Pierre Rhem.
75

exhibitions in arles

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