Since July 3, the scorching streets of Arles, in the south of France, have been teeming with pedestrians eager to discover the 54th edition of Les Rencontres d’Arles, the go-to photography festival in France, if not all of Europe. Last year’s edition saw about 127,000 visitors attend at least one of the many exhibitions that make up this festival; in recent years, regulars have grown used to booking their rooms a year in advance.
This year’s edition consists of around 30 exhibitions, which can sound overwhelming. Gregory Crewdson’s latest black-and-white series or a 450-image tribute to Diane Arbus might be a great place to start, but Les Rencontres is not solely about featuring giants of photography. The Emergences sector, from which the winner of the Fondation Louis Roederer’s Discovery Award will be chosen, is a case in point. Movies are the heart of the Stills to Stills section, where you’ll find an early series by Agnès Varda’s on the top floor of the Cloître Saint-Trophisme or Polaroids by Wim Wenders at the Espace Van Gogh. And with themes ranging from climate change to the contributions of female photographer, the festival’s director, Christoph Wiesdner, call Les Rencontres the “seismogram of our time”—a place to take the pulse of what makes society tick.
Below, a look at the five best exhibitions at the 2023 edition of Les Rencontres d’Arles, which runs through September 24.
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“Insolare” at Cloître Saint-Trophisme
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and BMW ART MAKERS The cloisters of Saint-Trophisme stand in the middle of Arles’s episcopal district. This is where Eva Nielsen and Marianne Derrien’s collaboration takes shape, as part of the BMW Art Makers program, which invites an artist and a curator to collaborate on an exhibition. Nielsen and Derrien met in their 20s, when Derrien was already studying art history and Nielsen was hoping to study at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, which she did eventually. The result of this long-standing friendship are 12 photographs combining topographic imagery, traditional paintings and silkscreen ones, each showcased on a self-supporting (and heritage-friendly) “module,” or structure. “We drove through shifting landscapes, where the sea and the land seem to merge,” Nielsen said of the Camargue region, which she did not expect to be as crowd-free as it was during the off-season. There, she zoomed into the cracks of the earth, both wet and dry, aiming to capture what often goes unseen. Back in her studio in Paris’s 13th arrondissement, Nielsen played with textures and layers, to offer a fragmented and blurry vision of the places she had visited with her partner in crime. The display is both poetic and hypnotic.
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“Moving Definitions” at Église des Frères-Prêcheurs
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and Experimenter The Louis Roederer foundation is one of Les Rencontres’s most significant supporters, and the ten short-listed applicants to the champagne house’s Discovery Award feature inside the 15th-century Église des Frères-Prêcheurs. Their submissions, brought together under the title “Moving Definitions,” were curated by New Delhi–based editor and author Tanvi Mishra, who specializes in South Asian histories as well as fiction in photography. During the festival’s opening week, the jury named Isadora Romero, whose images focus on agrobiodiversity, as the winner; a selection of her works will consequently be acquired for €15,000.
Just to the right of the entrance is Philippe Calia’s display, which serves as a manifesto for the rest of the show: curatorial narratives are not set in stone but meant to be, if not contested, at least reclaimed—and open to interpretation. Through her images on view in the exhibition and her comments in the accompanying visitors’ books, Calia questions the impact that institutions have on our relationship to art.
The center of the church is reserved for body-focused projects, such as Riti Sengupta’s “Things I Can’t Say Out Loud” series, which draws inspiration from when the 30-year-old Indian photographer had to move back in with her parents during the pandemic, only to realize how different her mother’s life was than hers. A photograph of a housewife with rubber gloves and a mop over her head says it all: women may still be defined by what they their labor. Taken with the series’ title, it is a poignant reflection on what can and cannot be said.
One of the most moving projects on view is Soumya Sankar Bose’s A Discreet Exit through the Darkness. When he was nine years old, his mother went missing. His grandfather died three years later, right before his mother was rescued. The artist confronts family pictures with a reading from his grandfather’s fictional diary in an effort to reconstruct the past.
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“Théâtre Optique” at Monoprix
Image Credit: Courtesy the Estate of Pierre Zucca What if your local Target were to host a major art exhibition? That’s the case at France’s equivalent, Monoprix, which has been doing so since the 2018 edition of Les Rencontres. Dating to the 1960s, the building is near the Arles train station. Past its automatic entrance doors, follow the signs upstairs for “Expositions.” Aurélien Froment’s “Théâtre optique” (Optical Theater) is worth making the trip. The series is a tribute to film-set photography which, to the artist, should be considered a genre on its own, somewhere between advertisement, documentary, and fiction.
To make his point, the Angers-born mixed media artist, who frequently shows on the biennial circuit, has brought together film stills made by French director and author Pierre Zucca (1943–1995) between 1963 and 1974. This captivating selection includes shots from François Truffaut’s Two English Girls (1971) and Day for Night (1972), and a series of illustrations for Liliane Siegel’s book Le yoga par l’image (Yoga Through Image), which reflects the theatrical and choreographic aspect of Zucca’s practice but also how close he was to his sitters.
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“Søsterskap” at Église Sainte-Anne
Image Credit: Both: Courtesy the artist Emma Sarpaniemi’s 2022 self-portrait as Cindy Sherman—in this iteration as a redhead with freckles, a yellow shirt, and pink tights—is the poster for this year’s edition of Les Rencontres. The image is included in “Søsterskap” (sisterhood, in Norwegian), a show devoted to 18 female photographers from Nordic countries. Near the entrance are pictures of women being arrested, all shown from behind to protect their identities. This ongoing series by Swedish artist Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff, titled “Oh Mother, What Have You Done,” can be interpreted as a metaphor for the female artist overstepping the norms of society. On the opposite wall is “Fathers,” a project by Norwegian artist Verena Winkelmann who photographs new dads with their babies, to counter how rarely men are shown as primary caregivers in an effort to encourage them to take on this responsibility. The closeness—both physical and emotional—between father and child is touching.
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“Casa Susanna” at the Espace Van Gogh
Image Credit: Courtesy Art Gallery of Ontario In 2004, two antique dealers discovered 340 photos from the 1950 and ’60s at a New York flea market, showing cross-dressing men and trans women, often dressed as “respectable” housewives. They were accomplished clerks, engineers, and pilots by day; the perfect cooks and hostesses by night. They called themselves Virginia, Doris, Fiona, Gail, Felicity, Gloria. Located in Upstate New York, Casa Susanna, which is also the title of the show, is where they would all meet up secretly to gather together in peace, close to New York but away from prying eyes. This captivating photo album records the private moments of one of the first transgender communities in American history.
