Daniel Castro Garcia, Catania, Sicily, Italy, August 2017 / Courtesy of the artist
Saying that the summer of 2022 will be one of revelations seems almost like stating the obvious. How can we be made to see what is staring us in the face, but takes so long to appear, as if the revelation could only be a forced birth? Photography, photographers and artists who use the medium are there to remind us of what we want to neither hear nor see. Yet, as Emanuele Coccia recalls, “it is to the visible, to images, that man turns for a radical testimony of his own being, his own nature.”
Every summer, the Rencontres d’Arles seizes a condition, demands, criticizes, rebels against established standards and categories and shakes up the way we look at things from one continent to another, reminding us of our absolute need to exist.
Bruno Serralongue, Gil Kills Pretty Enemy III in front of his house, posing with his weapons. McLaughlin, South Dakota, August 21, 2017. Water Protectors series, 2017, in progress. Courtesy of Air de Paris and the artist.
Curran Hatleberg, From the series Lost Coast, 2016, part of But Still, it Turns / Courtesy of the artist and MACK
Daniel Jack Lyons, Paulo, June 2019, Like a river series / Courtesy Loose Joints and the artist
Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza, Carmen (repetitions), 2021-2022 / Courtesy of the artist
Julia Gat, Sara and Michael, Israel, 2019 / Courtesy of the artist
Mitch Epstein, Shravanabelagola, Karnataka, India, 1981, Courtesy Black River Productions, Ltd. / Galerie Thomas Zander / Mitch Epstein
Tom Wood, Back cover, 1986, Looking for Love series / Courtesy the artist
Philip-Lorca diCorcia, William Charles Everlove, 26 years old, Stockholm, Sweden via Arizona, , 1990-1992 / Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery
Emanuele Brutti & Piergiorgio Casotti, From the series Index-G, 2018, part of But Still, it Turns / Courtesy of the artists and MACK
RaMell Ross, Here, from the series South County, 2018, part of But Still, it Turns / Courtesy of the artist and MACK
Sam Contis, Trust Exercise, 2018 / Courtesy of the artist and the Klaus von Nichtssagend gallery
Valentin Derom, The swimming pool, Parodia series, 2021 / Courtesy of the artist
Photography captures our existence in all its aspects, but it has not always mirrored the incredible richness and diversity of the artists. A long process of recognizing women photographers has been underway for about 40 years. Continuing the festival’s commitment, this year many venues will host shows reflecting their influence and creativity, from historic figures to forgotten or poorly known artists and today’s emerging young talents.
The human is at the heart of the festival, but so is nature: it is impossible to imagine one without the other. Ritual Inhabitual sounds the alarm over the dizzying expansion in Chile of industrial forestry and the planting of geometrical forests to supply an increasingly greedy paper industry. Meanwhile, the Mapuche people are being pushed further and further away from their land, cutting them off from their culture so closely linked to nature. In the United States, Bruno Serralongue documents the Sioux people’s ongoing struggle to protect their ancestral lands from the expansion of the oil and gas industry.
Romain Urhausen, Untitled, 1950s-1960s, Courtesy Romain Urhausen / Romain Urhausen’s Collection
Sathish Kumar, Portrait of a boy near my hometown, Town Boy series / Courtesy of the artist
Thomas Mailaender, Passion Light, 2022 / Courtesy of the artist
Debmalya Roy Choudhuri, Rockaways, New York, A factless autobiography series / Courtesy the artist
Katrien de Blauwer, Beginning (68), 2020 / Courtesy of Les filles du calvaire gallery and Fifty One gallery
Bettina Grossman, Drawing notebook / Courtesy Bettina Grossman
Mika Sperling, In my room, 2000, from the series I Have Done Nothing Wrong / Courtesy Mika Sperling
Klavdij Sluban, Poland, 2005, East to East series / Courtesy of the artist
Julien Lombardi, Cabinet of curiosities (excerpt), The land where the sun was born series, Mexico, 2017-2021 / Courtesy of the artist
The Rencontres also supports creativity with many tools developed over the years with our public and private partners in France and abroad. This year, for the first time, works by the winner of the grant created with the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa are being exhibited at Cloître Saint-Trophime, while those of the artists pre-selected for the Louis Roederer Discovery Award are shown at the Église des Frères-Prêcheurs, in the heart of the city, under the curatorship of Taous Dahmani.
Our reading of history continues with two exhibitions that strangely resonate in this terrible period, when war is raging on Europe’s doorstep. Gaëlle Morel offers a new look at the career of Lee Miller, a photographer beyond the muse she is often seen as. The show spans the years 1932 to 1945, from her studio work to commissions and her wartime photography until the liberation of the German concentration camps. Co-produced with the International Red Cross Museum, A World to Heal, the outcome of two years of research in the museum’s archives, takes a critical look at 160 years of humanitarian photography.
–Christoph Wiesner
Director of the Rencontres d’Arles
Rencontres d’Arles 2022
Visible or Invisible, A Summer Revealed
July 4 – September 25, 2022 / Rencontres d’Arles
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