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| © Roger Hicks Ltd 2007 |
JR is a young French photographer who prefers to be known only by these initials.
Click photo for more images from the Arles festival. |
Photographer and writer Roger Hicks has been attending the Rencontres d'Arles photography festival with fellow photographer (and his wife) Frances Schultz off and on for the last 15 years or so, always on their 1978 BMW R100RS motorcycle (much easier to park). Over the years the same bike has regularly taken them to Paris for Mois de la Photo, as well as photo events in Germany, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic. Traveling light with Leicas and Voigtländers, Roger and Frances cruised into Arles this year on July 2 and cruised out again on July 6. Below is Roger's frank assessment of the 2007 opening week, accompanied by his own photographs.
Les Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d'Arles -- literally, "the international photography meetings at Arles" -- is reputedly the biggest gathering of fine-art photographers in the world. And the opening week of the 38th Rencontres, beginning July 3, was by common consent among the best ever. The exhibitions were generally superb, the weather (apart from the strong Mistral wind) was just about perfect, and the organization, well, it was no worse than usual.
Although most of the Rencontres revolves around the exhibitions, which are probably the most use to the most people, there are also print critiques, prize awards, debates, screenings, talks and even commercial undertakings such as HP's print demonstrations.
Most printed information is in both French and English, so the language barrier is not insurmountable. Critiques are often available in English and many at HP speak English (even more speak American). As for the rest of the auxiliary events, it all depends on your level of tolerance for self-glorifying claptrap and pretentious drivel, usually conducted in French. As you may have guessed, mine is pretty low. Nowadays, instead of walking out of those things half-way through, bored witless, I just don't bother to go in the first place. But then there are the exhibitions. Ah, the exhibitions...
According to the organizers, there are 60 of them this year. Who knows if this is an accurate count -- you can never find all of them. Some seem permanently or at least capriciously closed; a single venue may contain the work of more than one photographer, and be classed as one exhibition or several; and there are exhibitions that are not, for one reason or another, on the official lists. Some are commercially sponsored (for example, by the phone network SFR), some run by schools (Magenta), some by collectives (Borax), some by galleries, and some by organizations that seem to exist only for the Rencontres (Voies Off). The list is endless. So where do you start?
For some years now, the best place has been at the old workshops (ateliers) of the French National Railways (SNCF). These are a fair walk from the town center, but there's a shuttle bus that runs to them from near the tourist office. This year, there was a good deal of stunning stuff there, from India (Pablo Bartholomew, Bharat Sikka, Dayanita Singh and Nony Singh), from China (Huang Ri, and the Chai-Na series), and from Magnum (a visual history of the agency's last 60 years that reads like a family album of the whole world).
Rather less expected was a portrait series of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, from infancy to her 80th birthday, which is a fascinating record of changing photographic styles as well as a single woman. An accompanying collection of portraits around the theme of "Madame Presidente" asked, "How would a female French head of state choose to be represented?" Annet van der Voort's ‘La Presidente, c'est moi' was a very formal self portrait, with just a modernist couple of inches of red-white-and-blue bra strap showing under the fur stole, and Raphael Dalaporta's collage ‘Le Pen playing with his breasts' showed the face of the National Front politician superimposed on a mildly pornographic postcard from the 1890s. These pictures were hung alongside another exhibition of real, historical prints of French presidents (male, naturally).
Several of the Madame Presidente pictures made me laugh out loud, as did many of the huge 28 millimetres pictures by photographer JR, who prefers to be known by only those two letters. The billboard-size close-ups were taken with a 28mm lens and displayed along city streets the world over.
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