ARTIST PRESENTED BY FLORIAN EBNER MÁJ/MY Stephanie Kiwitt carries on a documentary tradition that is critical and conceptual at the same time. Formal diversity and graphic elegance distinguish her approach. Through her constellations of images, the urban space, used as a fi eld of research, becomes not only abstract but also a mental space attesting […]

ARTIST PRESENTED BY AIDA MULUNEH STRANGER IN A FAMILIAR LAND It is not often that you come across new talent that breaks the aesthetic boundary that is labeled as ‘African Photography’, a term that is loosely thrown to shackle the diversity of photography from the continent. With this said, Sarah’s approach to photography is one […]

ARTIST PRESENTED BY STEFANO STOLL FLAT DEATH Using photography, installation, and recycled images, Sara Cwynar focuses on the tension caused by the encounter between photographic techniques and old and new technology. Playing with a ‘vintage’ spirit, she carefully creates series of visual anachronisms in the studio by appropriating found materials—often from flea markets or the […]

ARTIST PRESENTED BY AIDA MULUNEH LIFE AS A DISABLED PERSON Life as a Disabled Person is a collection showcasing the challenges and determination of the disabled community in Addis Ababa. The black and white images tell the story of an overlooked segment of society striving to conquer their physical limitations and challenge the general perception […]

ARTIST PRESENTED BY STÉPHANIE MOISDON For Marie Angeletti, photography is a fragmented narrative medium, a blank surface upon which experiences, staged scenes, existing situations, and everything beyond and in the background of the image itself, including the viewer, are projected in a system open to other possible stories. Her project evolves as she meets diff […]

ARTIST PRESENTED BY FLORIAN EBNER WEISSENFELS The huge light rooms of Leipzig-based artist Frank Berger can be understood as instruments that continually question the visual reality they are simultaneously representing. Through the sequences of his projections, the spectator submerges into the reality of urban spaces, while every slide adds to the preceding. His installation for […]

ARTIST PRESENTED BY MOUNA MEKOUAR Daisuke Yokota’s pictures evoke the inhabited places, secret gardens, and inner spaces we all have inside us. His metaphorical conception of space—a fictional mental or lived-in place—immerses the viewer in a world hovering between presence and absence, oblivion and resurgence. Like a distant echo, the repetition and manipulation of the […]

ARTIST PRESENTED BY STÉPHANIE MOISDON Christodoulos Panayiotou’s approach is resolutely multidisciplinary, nomadic, and synoptic. His screenings, exhibition slides, and performancereadings include architecture as well as choreography, text and image, ancient history and its hidden stories. The invention of archaeology plays a central role for him, providing an opportunity to create complex narrative structures involving time […]

ARTIST PRESENTED BY STEFANO STOLL Beni Bischof, an unclassifi able visual artist, sculpts with clay, metal, or chewing gum, paints with watercolours, draws with his fingers and humorously takes inspiration from everything from art brut to Saint Gall sausage. His heavy use of photography is characterised by the re-appropriation of existing images from the internet […]

ARTIST PRESENTED BY MOUNA MEKOUAR TROMPE L’OEIL Basma Al Sharif’s work slips between the fault lines of history to reveal moments, places, and real or fictitious events. Constantly navigating between past and present, she sets out to reconstruct moments from life, to tell stories, imbued or not with real and imaginary memories. A visual writing, […]

THE JUNGLE SHOW   When the Spanish conquistador Francisco de Orellana set out on his search for cinnamon in 1541, he could not have known that his travels would take him to the winding bends of the world’s longest river—the Amazon.   Long a witness to evangelisation campaigns, road-building projects and rubber, oil and gold […]

BATTLEFIELDS War is the father and king of all: some he has made gods, and some men; some slaves and some free. Heraclitus, fragment In the 1980s, Yan Morvan was a celebrated photojournalist, documenting the world’s major conflicts; his pictures were on magazines covers; he was among the greats in his profession. But the continual […]

Silent film pioneers shot Westerns in the Camargue before the First World War. This incredible story, which established the Rhône Delta as the setting for many films made throughout the 20th century, began when Buffalo Bill brought his Wild West Show to Paris in 1905. Folco de Baroncelli was in the audience. Amazed, he recognised scenes from […]

DRAMA AND FANTASY IN NOLLYWOOD MOVIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON CULTURAL AND VISUAL STORYTELLING IN AFRICA   Nollywood is the colloquial name for Nigeria’s booming commercial film industry. A cross-cultural phenomenon, with thousands of films produced each year and billions of dollars circulated, Nollywood films have made a big impact on film history and on […]

THE FABULOUS STORY OF LAS MARAVILLAS DE MALI   Swinging Bamako takes us back to a distant time when the Cold War simmered, world music came onstage, and newly independent Africa was a place where cultures and ideas mixed.   Each country in postcolonial Africa tried to find its own way. Utopian dreams converged with […]

THE METHOD OF LOCI   Is it possible to travel back in time? Stéphanie Solinas, an artist who enjoys enigmas and plays with protocols, has focused on austere material: the ‘Lustucru’ hall in Arles, a building with a complex past and an unknown future, a forlorn vessel open to the winds, abandoned on the city’s […]

FROM DOCUMENT TO REVELATION. HIS PHOTOGRAPHS AND LEGACY   Sid Grossman is an important but long-overlooked figure in modern American photography. Before his death in 1955 at the age of 42, he created a powerful and influential body of work. As an artist and a teacher, he profoundly shaped the vision of his time. However, […]

THE HOLLOW OF THE HAND From 2011 to 2014, singer/author/composer PJ Harvey and photographer Seamus Murphy travelled through Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Washington, D.C., continuing a collaboration begun with the album Let England Shake. There Seamus Murphy collected images (photo and video) marked by an aesthetic developed since the 1990s in his work as a photojournalist; […]

Winner of the 2015 Photo Folio Review   RADICALIA   I am a force of the past. Tradition is my only love. I come from the ruins, and churches, and altarpieces, the abandoned villages on the Apennines or on the Prealps, where brothers have lived. Like a madman I wander on the Tuscolana, on the […]

PHENOMENA, A CLOSE ENCOUNTER WITH A REALITY OF ALIENS AND UFOS What lies behind UFO phenomena? A commercially profitable story, a delusion with social consequences, a religious myth, a physical phenomenon?   The exhibition Phenomena examines the human need for faith through extensive research and collected data on the modern myth of ETs and UFOs. […]

A NEW REFUTATION OF THE VIKING 4 SPACE MISSION   Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity are still rattling across the Martian landscape, turning over rocks and ploughing the sand-drifts hoping against hope that a micro- scopic speck of life will turn up and convince us that we are not alone in this galaxy.   In the […]

THE ART OF EMBRACING SERENDIPITY AND MISTAKES Nowadays most art, design and photography portrays perfection. Contemporary popular culture is drowning under a tidal wave of superficiality and over-perfection. Posed, polished and controlled. As if it were a reflection of our endless search for clarity and calmness and an antidote for the chaos in our lives. […]

OLYMPUS CARTE BLANCHE DIARY OF A JOB Mickael Ackerman’s photographs take viewers to a place beneath ‘the black sun of melancholy’ that does not leave them unscathed. For nearly 20 years, the American photographer has chronicled a trembling, hallucinatory world rustling with cries and sighs. Olympus has given the rare, Nervalian photographer free rein this […]

OLYMPUS ENGAGES IN A PHOTOGRAPHIC CONVERSATION OLIVIER CULMANN / PAULINE ROUSSEAU / CORINNE MERCADIER / BARNABÉ MOINARD / KLAVDIJ SLUBAN / FLORIAN MAURER Olympus has been fostering dialogue between generations and starting conversations between established and emerging artists for four years. And since it has been committed to the École nationale supérieure de la photographie […]

LOOKING BACK AT THE MEDIA’S IMAGE OF 11 SEPTEMBER Irving Berlin wrote Nothing But Blue Skies in 1926. A classic performed by America’s greatest entertainers, the song could have been about the sky over New York on the morning of 11 September 2001. The intensity of the sky’s blue—reminiscent of a cinematic backdrop—gave the impression […]

THE CARDBOARD MUSEUM Plateforme10 brings together the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts (mcb-a), Musée de l’Elysée (the canton’s photography museum) and Musée de Design et d’Arts Appliqués Contemporains (MUDAC) on a site next to the railway station in Lausanne, Switzerland. Wanting to go beyond the traditional displays of building models and architectural plans, the three directors […]

AN OFF-BEAT LOOK INTO MONSTERS IN CINEMA Alternative genres such as science fiction, fantasy or utopia spawn stories that feed surprising reservoirs of images. Contemporary memory delves into them without preconceived ideas, shining a light on its fears and fantasies. For example, genre cinema abounds with weird works that engender certain myths of modernity. The […]

SÉBASTIEN LIFSHITZ COLLECTION I have always been interested in outsider discourses, those written outside mainstream history, far from any moral, political and social power or normalising gaze. That is why I have collected amateur photographs for many years: they show a different perspective on society. Cross-dressing is a great example. It is often said of […]

TOILETPAPER In 2010, contemporary artist Maurizio Cattelan and photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari founded Toiletpaper, a magazine made up of nothing but sparely and sophisticatedly staged photographs. Describing the publication as ‘a salacious six-monthly meeting’, Cattelan and Ferrari seem to critique a society dominated by consumption and appearances with provocative pictures. Each of their painstakingly constructed images […]

SYRCAS This exhibition presents Maud Sulter’s sixteen original photomontages, a seminal body of work created in the early 1990s that served as blueprint for her celebrated large-scale series Syrcas. Arguably the artist’s most intricate and layered body of work, Syrcas aims to revive, through the technique of photomontage, the forgotten history of the genocide of […]

RADICAL RELATION I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed. Garry Winogrand Photograph of the officer because of this photograph. Ethan Levitas Pairing the pioneering and complementary oeuvres of Ethan Levitas and Garry Winogrand, this exhibition re-examines street photography through its own language and terms in order to situate it properly within […]

A HISTORY OF MISOGYNY, CHAPTER ONE: ON ABORTION Under ‘natural’ circumstances, the average woman would become pregnant about 15 times in her life, resulting in ten births. Seven of those babies would survive childhood. For centuries, people have searched for ways to delay or terminate pregnancy. Today, safe and efficient means of abortion finally exist, […]

THE PHOTOGRAPHIC MAKING OF AN ICON The Statue of Liberty—an emblem of America, symbol of freedom and democracy, and colossal challenge sealing the union between art and technology—is one of the world’s most photographed landmarks. The Frenchman who designed it, Auguste Bartholdi, was himself a photographer. When the medium was just 10 years old and […]

OPERATION CONDOR LEST WE FORGET After making photographs of 25 former Portuguese political prisoners in 2005, photographer João Pina became acquainted with and began to research Operation Condor, a secret military plan started in 1975, during the Cold War, by six Latin American countries: Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay. Ruled by right-wing military […]

LES RÉVEILS DE L’IMAGE Quoting, borrowing and re-using images has always been a gateway to art history, but the appearance of fi lm and photography has particularly encouraged those practices. The itineraries of these new images—the changes in their nature, value and uses—continue to obsessively hold our contemporaries’ attention. This exhibition off ers insight into […]

Vingt-cinq ans d’une histoire chaotique, ponctuée d’outrages, de procès, référés, interdictions et saisies : de 1960 à 1985, Hara Kiri, journal « bête et méchant » fondé par François Cavanna et Georges Bernier, a attaqué la « France épouvantable » (Bernier) à la grenade de l’humour, de la provocation et du détournement. À côté de […]

GUILLAUME DELLEUSE / VINCENT MARCQ / CLÉMENTINE ROCHE Reflecting the long collaboration between the Rencontres d’Arles and the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie and their shared commitment to young photographers, for several years the festival has given three of the school’s graduates an opportunity to show their work as part of the official programme. […]

END. By what means the illusion of movement in space and, it almost seemed, in time was given, Watt could not say. But it was given. Watt wondered how long it would be before the point and the circle entered together upon the same plane. […] And he wondered what the artist had intended to […]

LOOKING BEYOND THE EDGE Don McCullin is known primarily as one of the most highly regarded conflict photographers of the late twentieth century, having produced some of the most iconic and defining images of war in Cyprus, Central Africa, Vietnam, and Lebanon. Looking Beyond the Edge takes a new perspective on McCullin’s work, presenting the […]

Christian Marclay regularly takes photographs and videos walking through London, where he lives. In Arles, he is showing a series of six new, silent projected animations along with Pub Crawl, a sound and video installation from 2014, each presented for the first time in France. Unlike Pub Crawl, in which Marclay coaxed sound from empty […]

YOKAINOSHIMA In 2013, just after finishing his European tour of winter masquerades (Wilder Mann), Charles Fréger began a photography project exploring Japan’s masked ritual figures. Photographing sumo wrestlers (Rikishi, 2002-2003) had already made him familiar with the country, but he knew nothing about rural areas. That is the topic of Yokainoshima: through an inventory of […]

WESTERN COLORS Bernard Plossu’s last official visit to Arles was for a 1987 group show of work by photographers using the Fresson process. At the age of 71, Western Colors is his first solo exhibition. Rewind: in 1966, Plossu arrived in San Francisco just after spending a little over 12 months in Mexico on a […]

NICEPHORA Alinka Echeverría, winner of the 2015 BMW Residency at the Musée Nicéphore Niépce, is working on a project that examines photography from the reproduction of the image to its dissemination, drawing inspiration from Nicéphore Niépce and his founding act. Interested in the depiction of women in the history of art and photography, she forges […]

MAGINOT LINE The Maginot Line was built between 1930 and 1939. A network of around 7,000 bunkers ran from Lille to Corsica. Tonnes of concrete gave material shape to France’s eastern limits. From September 1939 to May 1940, a million French soldiers were stationed in its depths, entering through heavy armoured doors. Once inside, they […]

Arles 2015, les Rencontres de la photographie photography by Thierry Bouët post-production: Carl Diner

CONSERVATOIRE DU LITTORAL   The Conservatoire du Littoral, a French public organisation dedicated to the protection of natural areas on coasts and lakeshores, celebrated its 40th anniversary on 10 July 2015, during the Rencontres d’Arles. This was a lucky coincidence: the Conservatoire has had a fruitful relationship with photography for 30 years. In 1984, it […]

WORKS FROM THE CENTRE NATIONAL DES ARTS PLASTIQUES   It’s a nice day, I’m going out: like a reflex. A response to the beckoning outdoors. But here, everything goes wrong. A gap opens up and the image no longer goes without saying. The vertical tipping of an already‐overturned lorry, the frustrated promise of a famous […]

50 YEARS OF AVANT-GARDE COLLECTION IN ARLES   In 1965, the birth of the first public photography collection in a French fine art museum took place in Arles at the Musée Réattu. Jean‐Maurice Rouquette, curator, and Lucien Clergue, photographer, dared to launch an avant‐garde project which would lead to the Rencontres d’Arles festival, the École […]

The €8,000 Author’s book Award honours the best work on photography published between 1 June 2014 and 31 May 2015. It is organised with support from the fnac. The €8,000 history book Award is for the best documented thematic or monographic work on photography or a photographer published between 1 June 2014 and 31 May […]

I WAS HERE. DARK TOURISM   Ambroise Tézenas evokes places marked by tragedy that now have their own guided tours. This phenomenon, known as ‘dark tourism’, is rooted in our fascination with the human capacity for evil, as well as our desire to see the aftermath of horror. Though related, dark tourism is not the […]

AROUND ARLES’S LA ROQUETTE BUSINESSES   Raymond Hains is one of the most noteworthy figures in the history of contemporary art. Although he signed the Constitutive Declaration of New Realism in Yves Klein’s studio in october 1960, his work defies classification. His slashed posters and supersized matchboxes are among his best‐known works, but in the […]

THE WOUTER DERUYTTER COLLECTION In his Natural History, published in 77 CE, Pliny the Elder lamented the short shrift given the Sphinx: ‘In front of the pyramids is the Sphinx, a still more wondrous work of art, but one upon which silence has been observed.’ The pyramids overshad‐ owed the Sphinx for millennia until drawings, […]

ÉCOLE NATIONALE SUPÉRIEURE DE LA PHOTOGRAPHIE, ARLES   This year’s jury (Agnès Sire, director, Fondation Henri Cartier‐Bresson; Marco Zappone, director, éditions Photosynthèses; and Sam Stourdzé, director, Rencontres d’Arles) has brought an unusual attention to bear on four students who, each with a different style and approach, nonetheless are united in their desire to disrupt and […]

THREE SERIES FROM THE JEAN-MARIE DONAT COLLECTION   By nature, the collector’s eye links disparate images that would have remained unknown or misunderstood had it not patiently identified similarities, resemblances, and affinities. In some cases, the art of collecting, by contiguity and concordance, redoubles the mystery of the meaning of the whole. Two or three […]

BIENVENUE   A woman in a blue shirt with dark blond hair and a gentle face moves through the centre and outskirts of Angers. She crosses these neighbourhoods, perhaps wandering a little. In any case, walking, she becomes the lone narrator of an enigmatic, silent journey. The action occurs on a single sunny day, but […]

ANONYMOUS   Walker Evans (1903‐1975) remains one of the most important and influential photographers in the history of the medium. His career spanned the emergence of the modern mass media in the 1920s to the full acceptance of photography as an art form in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of Evans’s individual images have become […]

THE GREAT ADVENTURE OF ALBUM COVER PHOTOGRAPHY   A history of photography through the prism of the vinyl record. These two media, which left their mark on the 20th century, interplayed in all their forms, from artwork to illustration, figuration to experimentation. The show is based on this diversity of intentions and propositions. The first […]

LP COLLECTION, HIDDEN TREASURES OF UNDERGROUND MUSIC   Laurent & Patrick (LP) met at the office. During one momentous coffee break they discovered that they shared the same passion for music and especially for vinyl records of obscure and fascinating bands. The LP Collection exhibition presents a snapshot of their work of documentation and distribution, […]

Stephen Shore is one of the most important and visibly influential photographers of the past three decades. The new approach that defines his contribution to photography and its language has continued to arouse the interest of different generations of artists and he remains a key reference point for young photographers working today. As a result, […]

LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT   Natasha Caruana’s photography is part ethnography, part performance. For her, it is a way of writing about things she wants to study. based on personal experience, her photographic stories—Married Man, Fairytale for Sale, The Other Women, The Detective, and Love Bomb—are about love affairs, betrayal, and fantasies. Ms. Caruana, winner […]

The nominators of the 2015 Discovery Award Presentation of the 10 nominated artists by their nominators: Krzysztof Candrowicz presents Anna Orlowska and Shilo Group ; Louise Clements presents Lisa Barnard and Robert Zhao Renhui ; Fannie Escoulen presents Pauline Fargue and Julián Barón ; Claire Jacquet presents Delphine Chanet and Omar Victor Diop ; Francesco […]

Paolo Woods and Gabriel Galimberti   Tax havens have quietly taken the world by storm. More than half of world trade now passes through these places. They are in the news every day, and are fast becoming a constant fixture of political debate. The growing flow of articles and reports on this poorly understood subject […]

IMPONDERABLE : THE ARCHIVES OF TONY OURSLER   An exhibition commissioned and produced by the LUMA foundation for the Parc des Ateliers in Arles, France. ‘Imponderable’ is an extensive research project that investigates the personal collection of American artist Tony Oursler, a remarkable trove of more than 2,500 photographs, publications and unique objects, tracking a […]

Matthieu Chedid meets Martin Parr   The MMM exhibition is the product of a meeting. The meeting of two personalities: a musician with a pronounced visual bent and one of the most important figures in contemporary photography. They meet here in a dialogue sustained by two widely separated and diverse environments. The composer’s ‘homage’ gives […]

Cosmos, formerly Supermarkt (2009), Hypermarkt (2010‐2012), and The Club (2013), was invited in 2015 by the Rencontres d’Arles to join the official programme under the name Cosmos‐Arles Books. Cosmos‐Arles Books’ creative direction has been entrusted to Olivier Cablat and Sebastian Hau and Sam Stourdzé, director of the Rencontres d’Arles. dedicated to photobooks, this new satellite […]

Art is nurtured by correspondences, echoes, and influences, whether avowed or no. All artists stand on their forerunners’ shoulders, and one day others will stand on theirs. Every year for three years, Olympus has revitalised this never‐ending dialogue by asking great names in contemporary photography to sponsor three young graduates of the École Nationale Supérieure […]

Images from the archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown   Learning from Las Vegas, a treatise on architectural theory published in 1972, captivates us primarily through its engaging visual discourse developed during Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s 1968 research and design studio course at Yale. For Venturi, Scott Brown, and their collaborator, […]

A photographer, in a certain sense, paints with light. sometimes, however, a photographer must work—painstakingly, patiently—with shadow, in order to bring the latter into real life and show us a hidden aspect of reality. This is, in large part, the secret of this exhibition. Its main character is the Congo, my homeland, which I revisit […]

Between 1918 and 1924, over four journeys, the German missionary Martin Gusinde became the only anthropologist capable of conducting an in‐depth study of the Selk’nam, Yamana, and Kawésqar societies, which were by then already considerably diminished. Within the framework of a ‘safeguarding’ ethnography characteristic of its era, Martin Gusinde used a methodology of observation that […]

The collections of the Maison européenne de la photographie   The Maison européenne de la Photographie in Paris now has around 21,000 works in its collections. Founded over 35 years ago, the MEP has followed the tastes and trends of its times, revealing a survey of photography from the second half of the 20th century. […]

Photographs by Paul Ronald   As if by magic, Federico Fellini’s legendary black and white film 81⁄2 makes an appearance in colour, immortalised by Paul Ronald. The producers asked him to photograph scenes in black and white. But Ronald had two Hasselblad cameras, and he loaded the second one with a roll of colour film, […]

Another Language: Eight Japanese Photographers presents significant bodies of work by Masahisa Fukase, Eikoh Hosoe, Kou Inose, Daido Moriyama, Masatoshi Naito, Sakiko Nomura, Issei Suda and Daisuke Yokota. The exhibition is comprised of over 200 prints, both vintage and contemporary, which, for the most part, have never previously been seen in Europe. Another Language takes […]

Sandro Miller – Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich: Homage to Photographic Masters   At the age of sixteen, upon seeing the work of Irving Penn, Sandro Miller knew he wanted to become a photographer. Mostly self‐taught, sandro learned his craft by studying books published by many of the great artists canonised in photographic history. Through their pictures, […]

‘Hello sir, I’m calling about your ad on Le Bon Coin concerning the riding boots. Are they still available?’ —  ‘yes, they are.’ —  ‘Great. Where are they from?’ —  ‘An Italian shoemaker.’ —  ‘Are they new or used?’ —  ‘I’ve hardly ever worn them. I got the wrong size. Are you a size 41?’ […]

NORTH KOREA, A LIFE BETWEEN PROPAGANDA AND REALITY Winner of the 2014 photo Follo Review   April 2013. While the Western media dogs Kim Jong‐un’s steps during his missile test launches, I travel 2,500 kilometres through the North Korean interior. Once arrived in North Korea, the images I know from my advance research correspond with […]

The FACADES by Markus Brunetti evoke enthusiasmor a sense of estrangement. For the viewer they raise questions that are often posed today, in the ‘age of technical manipulation’. Questions that Brunetti responds to only with his works. The pictures are digitally captured and meticulously worked out in a time‐consuming process. The final step requires printing […]

DUCK, A Theory of Evolution   In 1930, duck farmer Martin Maurer commissioned a duck‐shaped building for his retail poultry shop in flanders, a small town on Long Island, New York. In 1972, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour wrote Learning from Las Vegas, in which they examined the concepts of vernacular, functional, […]

AMERIACAN NEON SIGNS BY DAY & NIGHT   In the mid‐1970s, Toon Michiels made various journeys to the united states of America, where he undertook a number of road trips in a rented car to, among other places, reno and Las Vegas. very quickly, Michiels developed a fascination for the spectacular neon signs that motels […]

By Joan Fontcubertafr

Beyond being this woman of Arles celebrated to the point of caricature by the poets, artists and musicians of the end of the 19th century up until today, the Arlésienne cannot be reduced to a Graeco-Roman profile, a chiselled velvet ribbon and a lace headscarf, no matter how exceptional and mythic they may be. The […]

Throughout the modern era, photography has been deployed to catalogue the world and its people. Photographers and institutions have struggled laboriously to arrange, to order, and to catalogue this infinitude of images into coherent presentations and archives. This exhibition investigates how these progressive archives, utilizing the formal tools of classification, have opened critical challenges to […]

When Raymond Depardon photographed France’s villages and neighbourhoods during a five-year period, it was difficult for his lense not to regularly encounter monuments to the dead, given that they are such a part of towns’ landscapes. On the occasion of the centenary of World War I, the Rencontres presents for these photographs for the first […]

Lucien Clergue is 80 years young and bursting with energy. For this anniversary, we wanted to put things in order, bring the reading of his photography back to its essential elements and sort out the stories he recounts with such loquaciousness, in order to accompany them. The nudes which made him famous rest alongside fragile […]

This passion for collecting is foolish. Collectors must be fools. Fou. Foule. Welcome to Hunt’s three-ring circus.It took awhile in my own collecting to have the confidence in my own ‘eye’ to be image driven as opposed to being caught up in the reputation of the artist. And if you are really humming as a […]

Winners of the third BMW Photographic Residency at the Musée Nicéphore Niepce in 2013, Mazaccio & Drowilal exhibit a large selection of their work, including that produced during the residency in Chalon-sur-Saône.Mazaccio & Drowilal do not actually need to create their own photographs. Society caters for their demand for representative images. It suffices to bend […]

My collection of decorative and utilitarian 3-dimensional objects enhanced with photographic images reflects photography’s shifting identity, one that has long encompassed vernacular and fine art expressions, a convergence of high and low cultures. A range of 20th-century commercial and fine art articles are examined alongside 19th-century artisanal and amateur works, amplifying photographic expression to illustrate […]

THE NOMINATORS The five nominators of the 2014 Discovery Award are photography experts from five continents who programme festivals and/or work at institutions. Quentin Bajac, chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, Alexis Fabry, a curator specialising in Latin American photography and the founder of Toluca Editions in Paris, Bohnchang Koo, exhibition curator […]

In China, one genre seems to prefigure the panoramic photograph: portraits of emperors or high dignitaries, alone or as a couple, then shown again with their descendents. These vertical ‘accumulations’ in the form of family trees are the ancestors of panoramas.Western photographers first used panoramas to show landscapes like the bay of Hong Kong. The […]

Eternal Friendship is a photo-novel composed of archival photographs, which can be read like a cartoon strip. It interweaves history with a capital H and simple stories, the friendship between peoples –from Communist China and Albania in the 1970s– and the indestructible friendship between two men. The novel begins in China with the arrival of […]

I’ve been asked to say what I think of Patrick Swirc’s photographs. Language. With words, he gets stuck, never says what he wants to, goes wide of the mark: he says this, without thinking, or that, instantly regretting it. He’s afraid of getting completely lost – and yet the boundless vertigo before he takes a […]

Vincent Pérez is a true photographer, not because he studied this discipline in that temple which is the Vevey School of Photography, but because of his mastery of the portrait and the creativity of his mises en scène. An actor and director, cinema is obviously his preferred terrain. He has the advantage of an insider’s […]

Album presents two new bodies of work – the eponymous Album series as well as Postcards from Nowhere. Muniz continues to explore the contemporary fragmented visual experience, with an increased emphasis on nostalgia and the materiality of photography. The Album series utilizes found personal photographs collected by Muniz over a number of years. The images […]

The Dutch are among the tallest people in the world, yet they live in one of the world’s smallest countries. Cities in The Netherlands are crowded, houses are small and personal space is hard to find. People and other people’s stuff always surround the Dutch. They are hardly ever alone. In a place where horizons […]

In the last decade there has been a major reappraisal of the role and status of the photobook within the history of photography. Revisionist histories of photography as recorded via the photobook have added enormously to our understanding of the medium’s culture, particularly in places that are often marginalized, such as Latin America and Africa. […]

The postcard is part of our history, our imagination. It is also, given its extremely wide circulation, a privileged reinforcement of ideology. The postcards from the Colonies shown here were exchanged between Westerners and remained unknown by those represented on them. Through them, the homeland believed it was discovering peoples when, in fact, what it […]

For more than fifty years, David Bailey has produced outstanding images for the great fashion magazines (including more than 350 covers for British Vogue), directed award-winning commercials and films, and created his own special projects and publications. This exhibition has been selected by Bailey and brings together those portraits, which he believes to be specially […]

Since it began in 2008 the Prix Pictet has become one of the world’s leading prizes for sustainability and photography. For each new cycle, the Prix Pictet adopts a different theme. There have, to date, been four cycles of the award – Water, Earth, Growth, and Power. The fifth cycle Consumption concludes with an exhibition […]

A CASE STUDY IN AVANT-GARDE PHOTOGRAPHYIt is with great satisfaction that MOKBA is at last able to do justice to an invaluable artistic legacy, hitherto unknown to specialists and the public alike, in presenting here for the first time a selection of works from the Trepat Collection of Modern Photography. These photographic fonds owe their […]

If churches were the only building common to all French municipalities since the Middle Ages, the work of memory which are the monuments to the dead of 1914-1918, erected after The Great War which devastated France, have become an indelible scar in the heart of all the nation’s towns.The Rencontres d’Arles, Mission du Centenaire de […]

Paris, August 1915: men are at war and women work Far from their parents, the children of the rue Greneta play at battle. Equipped with only his camera and the inspiration of a few Poulbot drawings, Léon Gimpel faced this army of kids. From this encounter in the heart of the Sentier neighbourhood was born […]

Winner of the 2013 Photo Folio Review The On Thin Ice project is a series of photos from Greenland and one of the chapters in a long-term project concerned with the human face of climate change as it threatens various low-lying regions. The series shows the life of hunters in Northern Greenland, In my exploration, […]

I deep dive here into an initiation ritual and aim to create an artistic and documentary photography, very close to the daily experience of Ekonda pygmies in the Democratic Republic of Congo.For the Ekondas, the most important moment in the life of a woman is the birth of her first child. The young mother (usually […]

My body of photographs, Revelations, started in 2011, explore the way in which Africa is imaged and understood in the West as well as questioning the ‘contemporary African condition’ by juxtaposing the past and the present of a continent in constant the grip of violent civil wars. These constructed environments are enticing and seductive but […]

For the past five years, I have photographed with unrestricted access the newsroom and printing plant of The Philadelphia Inquirer. Through a depiction of The Inquirer’s efforts to prevail despite depleted ad revenue, a steady decline in circulation, lay-offs, buy-outs, and bankruptcy, my intent is to reveal the challenges and harsh realities that face the […]

In 2003, a little before the US presidential elections, I decided that I wanted to document the USA through one town, one small environment. George W. Bush was elected for the second time and was fighting terrorism.This is the story of a small town, Hungry Horse, situated in the Montana Rocky Mountains just a few […]

Saying that it is a song is a joke. Saying that it is our mother river or the root of our souls is deliberate oblivion.Indulging in the turbulent pleasures of the modern world day after day, we put the winding river out of our minds, no longer taking even a moment to gaze calmly upon […]

The war had taken away many things. Not only had it mercilessly trampled our beloved families and neighbours, but also their happiness and hope; indeed, humanity itself. At the height of the Korean War, I moved among the front lines as a soldier experiencing this tragedy, witnessing countless scenes that enraged me.I left the army […]

In this very abstract series of images I exhibit in Arles, I show compositions derived from studying the incidence of light in space through the image of shadows. I have had always a strong interest on how light affects the ephemeral perception of time. I am interested in the emotional quality of light, its harmony […]

The photographs of the T.V. Set series dramatically engage the theatrical space of actual television sets of private television stations (the point of reference would be small, perhaps alternative or experimental, television channels). Each photograph proposes a new set as it portrays a single physical space. The idea behind this project is to invert the […]

‘With her room-filling installations Katharina Gaenssler touches on fundamental questions of seeing and perception. In her collages and the subsequent dé-collages, as well as in her book objects she utilises the possibilities offered by the medium of photography, yet without yielding to classical constraints’, Hans-Michael Koetzle in Katharina Gaenssler, Ephemer, Salon Verlag, Cologne, 2010.Characteristic of […]

ANCIENT EGYPT RECAPTURED (1850-1914)In the early 19th century, the research of the Institut d’Egypte and the deciphering of hieroglyphics laid bare the traces of the ancient Egyptian civilisation that would thenceforth fascinate the West. Egypt’s ancient monuments became a favoured photographic subject. The Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, the oldest institution devoted to the study […]

For thirty years, Spanish photographer Chema Madoz has held a particular place in the international artistic scene. His highly singular work does not adhere to any particular trend, although the influence of the Surrealist movement has often been noted. Extremely rigorous on a graphic level, his black and white compositions of the banal or familiar […]

For two years now, Denis Rouvre has been travelling around France, from Brittany to the Basque Coast, from the Vendée to Alsace. Exploring towns and countryside, he has caught up in his wake the French people he’s photographed and talked to, creating an installation about identity which mixes images and voices. At a time when globalisation […]

History deposits its sediments on walls like paint on canvas. Functioning as a support and a facade, walls define a place by marking its boundaries, registering what has been accumulated in the spaces they circumscribe. The creation of Azoulay’s large panoramas is preceded by a prolonged process of wandering through urban construction and demolition sites. […]

by Denis Rouvre

Symposium, 5 july 2013. Today creation in black and white, the temptation of colour.   With photographers Daido Moriyama and Pieter Hugo; Simon Baker, Curator of Photography and International Art at the Tate Modern in London; Pascal Beausse, Manager of the Photography Collections at the National Visual Arts Centre; and Christian Caujolle, independent curator. Led […]

Transition is a collaborative photographic project carried out by French and South African photographers and focusing on the territory of South Africa. The project brings together works by six South African photographers (Santu Mofokeng, Pieter Hugo, Zanele Muholi, Cedric Nunn, Jo Ractliffe, Thabiso Sekgala) and six French photographers (Patrick Tourneboeuf, Alain Willaume, Raphaël Dallaporta, Harry Gruyaert […]

Labyrinth + Monochrome is a black and white photographic installation that plunges the visitor into a flow of images specific to Daido Moriyama’s photographic practice. Born in Japan in 1938, Daido Moriyama is one of the world’s major contemporary photographers. A member of the post-World War Two Japanese avant-garde, he began his photographic career in the 1960s. The […]

In 1936, after the Popular Front’s victory, the youth hostel movement in France underwent huge expansion, spurred on by the then youth minister Léo Lagrange. This movement gave young people the possibility of taking advantage of paid leave, newly implemented by the government, to travel cheaply and stay in economical, ecological and socially mixed hostels. […]

Renaissance scholars, improving on the method recommended by St. Thomas Aquinas to readers so that they may enhance their ability to remember, suggested the mental construction of architectural models, palaces, theatres, etc., to house the thing people wish to remember. They recommended that these things of the mind should be treated affectionately and that they […]

I was an art student in Bogota, a very conservative city; in photography I’d found a means of expression for my sexual orientation. In the middle of the 1960s, I discovered the Faenza and other rundown cinemas where homosexuals could meet up. I went to these cinemas for several years. The moments I experienced there […]

Pieter Hugo’s There’s a Place in Hell for Me and My Friends is a series of close-up portraits of the artist and his friends, all of whom call South Africa home. Through a digital process of converting colour images to black and white while manipulating the colour channels, Hugo emphasizes the pigment (melanin) in his sitters’ skins […]

Valles Marineris, Olympus, Arcadia Planitia, Elysium Mons, Planum Boreum, Icaria Fossae andNoachis Terra are so many Martian regions flown over by the NASA space probe put into orbit in 2005 to study the planet’s surface. From among the tens of thousands images recorded, and possessing a resolution without precedent, Xavier Barral has extracted a series of photographs […]

Shortly after its creation in 1997, the Arab Image Foundation started collecting photographs from anonymous, amateur and professional photographers. The first two major collections gathered from studio photographers were those of Van-Leo in Cairo and Adib Ghorab in Beirut, both presented in this exhibition through a selection of hand-colored studio portraits. STUDIO FOUAD Born in […]

These photographs are a selection from a variety of projects in both France and England made between 1980-2009. In these images I attempt to create a narrative to tell visual stories about social and political process, change and transformation. The earliest photographs are from a series of explorations into isolated landscapes in the British Isles […]

The Dark RoomIn 2011 when Shelly Verthime was, in the words of Guy Bourdin’s son Samuel, ‘exploring, studying, plumbing the depths of my father’s archives and exhuming their substance’, she found a cardboard box containing a hundred brown paper postal envelopes, in each of which Guy Bourdin had placed a negative and the corresponding black […]

Empreinte is both an extension of and a rupture in Antoine Gonin’s work on landscape. Although his earlier Horizons resembled a long inventory of French landscape and heritage, its black and white images were primarily descriptive and established, in a narrative mode, a kind of photographic panorama of France’s natural and architectural beauties. With Empreinte, he seems to lose […]

This collection brings together more than a hundred press photos published between 1910 and 1970 by American dailies such as The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Boston Herald, The Denver Post, The Detroit News… Gelatin-silver prints retouched with gouache and ink, by brush and airbrush, bearing reframing marks, handwritten technical notes and marks in soft […]

‘And now it is up to you, modest photographs, to do what you can—very little, I know—to tell everything, explain everything, make everything be imagined Everything, even and above all what cannot be photographed.’ Diary, 1931. An amateur of genius endowed with precocious talent, Jacques Henri Lartigue was discovered and made famous by the United […]

Everything began in the summer of 1995, when Gilbert Garcin, recently retired but quite simply wanting a second life, decided to launch into photography and, in order to so, participated in classes at the Rencontres d’Arles. Here he practised photomontage, which would be his first source of inspiration. From that time on, using himself as […]

What happens inside your mind can happen inside a camera is a line I wrote as a copywriter for a camera account when I decided to become a photographer in 1970. For more than forty years now, an opposite principle has also held true in all of my work: what you see happening in my photographs […]

In 1964, still leaving the dream of their recently gained independence, Zambia started a space program that would put the first African on the moon catching up the USA and the Soviet Union in the space race. Only a few optimists supported the project by Edward Makuka, the school teacher in charge of presenting the […]

Alfredo Jaar seems like a made-to-measure guest for Arles. A large part of his work consists of questioning photography when it plays the role of a supposedly objective journalistic witness. Through installations, screenings and the accumulation of documents which converge towards a message that the visitor progressively, often physically discovers, Alfredo Jaar overturns our possible […]

Sergio Larrain moved through the photographic universe like a meteorite. His concern for purity and the appeal of meditation led him to isolate himself, after many journeys, in the Chilean countryside, where he lived a self-sufficient life and taught yoga and drawing. From here he wrote an enormous amount, concerned with raising awareness about humanity’s […]

2012 WINNER OF THE “BMW RESIDENCY” AT THE MUSÉE NICÉPHORE NIÉPCE. Winner of the second ‘BMW Residency’ at the Musée Nicéphore Niépce, Marion Gronier exhibits the work carried out at Chalon-sur-Saône. There is nothing more contradictory in what we see here than these ravaged faces and their worried or absent eyes. We feel uncomfortable. Everything […]

Exhibition tour with the winners of the 2013 SFR Young Talents Award. Exhibition venue: Atelier de Mécanique, Rencontres d’Arles 2013.

Exhibition tours with the nominators Zeina Arida, Diane Dufour, Alison Nordström, Brett Rogers and Olga Sviblova and the ten nominated artists. Exhibition venue: Atelier de Mécanique, Parc des Ateliers, Rencontres d’Arles 2013.

This exhibition recounts thirty years of commitment to those who live on the margins of our society and who are in the worst position to be able to defend themselves. From the children suffering from cancer at the Institut Curie to the children abandoned in Romanian orphanages, from the homeless in the Nanterre shelter to […]

We’re exposed to an overload of images nowadays. This glut is in large part the result of image-sharing sites like Flickr, networking sites like Facebook, and picture-based search engines. Their content mingles public and private, with the very personal being openly and unselfconsciously displayed. By printing all the images uploaded in a twenty-four hour period, […]

Le Pays clair results from several arts residencies undertaken by Thibaut Cuisset in the Camargue, at the invitation of Laetitia Talbot from the Asphodèle Association, in partnership with the Tour du Valat. A unique area that continues to fascinate painters and artists, like all landscapes, the apparently wild and natural Camargue is in fact the […]

John Stezaker has been centrally influential in a number of developments in art over the last four decades; from Conceptual Art, New Image Art through to contemporary interest in the collage. Showing first as a part of the British Conceptual Art group in The New Art, 1972 (the first Hayward Annual), Stezaker’s interest in the […]

The relations between photography and the Festival d’Avignon go back to the festival’s very first years and to the work of Agnès Varda, who contributed to forging the Avignon legend. Through her amazing ability to create, with the actors, images that allowed something of theatrical performance to be perceived, she offered us both the gaze […]

The origins to Giuseppe Penone’s oeuvre lie in ‘the desire to establish a relationship of equals between himself and things’. From his very first works, he instigated a relationship with the organic world and with nature, in particular with trees: ‘In May 1969, I went into the forest and I set on down a path […]

In the Netherlands and abroad Viviane Sassen is known foremost as an artist, whose somewhat surreal, colourful photographs of Africa won her the Prix de Rome in 2007. Alongside her autonomous work, however, she has long worked as a fashion photographer. Her fashion work is held in high regard, and she has carved out her […]

From late-2009 to the beginning of 2010, my daily routine saw me rise at 5:30 every morning. First thing, I would check for hints of light dawning above the eastern horizon. If the day promised fair weather, next I would sight the ‘morning star’ shining to the upper right of the nascent dawn. Only then […]

AN UNUSUAL ATTENTION, CLASS OF 2013 Jeannie Abert Claire Cocano Edwin Fauthoux-Kresser Leslie Moquin The task was not easy: focusing ‘unusual attention’ on four young ENSP graduates from the class of 2013. The idea is to show four very different viewpoints rooted in reality, sometimes straying from it to return to it better, where the […]

For a long time it was my calling to stand on cliffs and gaze at the horizon, where the sea touches the sky. One day, standing atop a lone island peak in a remote sea, the horizon encompassing my entire field of vision, for a moment it felt as if I was floating above an […]

BLOOM A sunset, backstage at an opera house with its costumes and sets, a boat’s mainsail, wild and majestic animals, a child’s innocence, a field of lavender Here we have some photographic clichés, those that talented photographers avoid because it is so easy to create a touching image when the scene to be photographed is […]

Over 20 years Wolfgang Tillmans has tested and expanded the possibilities of photography in the most varied ways through his photographic and video works. His exhibition New World presents photographs from the artist’s new group of works of the same name, which were created in the course of numerous journeys. Twenty years after Wolfgang Tillmans first started […]

Presented for the first time in France, the An American Story exhibition proposes a synthesis of the exceptional career of American photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks (1912-2006). In a country that has turned the pioneer figure into a source of heroic mythology and national pride, Gordon Park’s biography is epic: he was the first African […]

The Dissonance exhibition of painting and sculpture takes place in a particular context. An international artist of Korean origin, mainly living in Japan when he isn’t in his Parisian studio, or busy developing his foundation in New York, in the past few years, Lee Ufan has been sought out by the greatest art institutions and […]

Zimbabwe, former Rhodesia, has become a forgotten land. Today, with no light cast on the dark shadows of Robert Mugabe’s relentless tyranny, the downtrodden people of one of Africa’s most hauntingly beautiful nations rightfully feel abandoned by the world. Their modest hope devoured by the malice and greed of politicians, Zimbabwe’s people have nowhere to […]

As our society increasingly relies upon industrial agriculture, there are still those who continue a close relationship with the land and all it has to offer, be they hunters, farmers, woodsmen, gardeners, or foragers. My work recognizes and acknowledges their commitment in a series of portraits that honors these individuals in their environments.My approach to […]

Nikolai Bakharev’s cycle Relationship dates from the late 1980s to early 1990s. What were at first sight the usual ‘beach’ shots by which many photographers like Bakharev made a living in the Soviet period, providing souvenir snaps for holidaymakers, have now become classics of Russian photography, the portrait of a historical era at the moment […]

I work, for the most part, with black and white, believing it offers a psychological level of clarity that helps to strip the visual world down to its very core. My aim is to take photography to task by highlighting its many uses and it many limitations—operating at all times in the slim corridor between […]

I have collected almost twelve hundred packages of expired photographic papers. The expiration dates on the labels represent every decade of the twentieth century as well as rare examples from the late nineteenth century. This archive is a cross section of the history of photographic print materials, and it is the main resource for my […]

In 2010 Lauren Bon invited artists, scientists, and inventors to convene in the dusty playa of the Owen’s dry lakebed. Her vision was to make a film of the landscape out of the landscape. Using handmade pinhole cameras, and a developer formulated from the dust of the lakebed the group successfully produced a short 16mm […]

The selection presented in Arles will feature works from various series including, ‘Elysium’ 2013.These works are carte-de-visite scanned photographs adorned with dried flowers. Elysian Fields is a mythological place where blessed souls of the dead stay. They are surrounded by invisible lira music, poplars and asphodels (flowers which symbolize death, grief, melancholy, eternity).Marcela Paniak Prints by […]

Photographs from Turkey 1968-1972I received these photographs on the 30th anniversary of the 68-movement in Turkey. The photographs were hidden and saved by the members of the 68-movement. They were taken in several neighborhoods of Istanbul, Tokat, Niksar and Kzldere and in many other places all around Turkey. Some of them are from the massacre […]

This is the story of four strong and feisty woman, exiled to the four corners of the globe, four Palestinian-Lebanese sisters who traversed the 20th century. It is a story somewhere between documentary and fiction, biography and drama, based on family photographs and taped interviews—a narrative of both actual and imagined events.It is a reflection […]

With these photo series, Martin Becka interrogates us about our sense of how we organise the present and about our hopes for the future. Using photographic processes that date from the invention of photography, he disorients the beholder by setting up an illusion of ‘collapsed time’. Dubai, for example, paradise of globalisation, with its monumental […]

Le Monde Fluide des Formes (The Fluid World of Forms) exhibition brings together a selection of video works by Muriel Toulemonde, made between 2001 and 2011. The title attempts to take into account two essential and intrinsically connected dimensions of the artist’s work: the observation of flow and the study of movement. The selection of […]

A meteorite bears witness to the first formation of matter in our solar system. It has remained unaltered since its birth several billion years ago, keeping the memory of the genesis of our environment under its surface. We are confronted with existential questions: What is the world made of? How did it evolve? How do […]

We go into a church, the Église des Prêcheurs* Not being French, I thought that it’s the Église des Pêcheurs** The church is close to the Rhône François Hébel has told me That it was built in the fifteenth century But that it was secularised at the time of the French Revolution. So we’re in […]

My practice explores the possibilities of creating images that combine the visceral and the sublime. Drawing on the idea of perception as participatory and the body as part of the flesh of the world, my work addresses the senses. Images of incandescent and dripping dwellings not only evoke primeval hungers but also envelop and absorb. […]

Seen and captured by someone else’s eyes reminds us that the image we have of ourselves is not absolute, it is not truthful. In many senses the mirror lies more than a photograph. We learn to see ourselves in such a one-dimensional way, that hardly any image can satisfy us anymore. While time gnaws away […]

Intended Consequences is a series of environmental portraits made in Rwanda of women that were brutally raped during the Rwandan genocide and the children they bore from those brutal encounters. Over the course of three years, I traveled to Rwanda several times, to photograph, interview, and uncover more details of the heinous crimes committed against […]

My work is a visual exploration of making/mapping/preserving radical black lesbian and queer (LGBTI : lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex) visual history in post-Apartheid South Africa. I explore how visual activism can be employed by socially, culturally, politically and economically marginalized individuals to create sites of resistance as well as to develop a critical gaze […]

Our series of work highlights a multi-cultural clash between religion and popular cultures. We explore the dominating influence of Western theatrics and those narratives that are constructed to depict a certain reality. Inspired by Hollywood’s visual language and tactics, we create our own narratives. Each photograph reflects one another in a battle for the moral […]

2006, the first democratic elections take place in the Congo. The same year, we note a strong demand for copper and cobalt. Several international investors make a rush for Katanga. Among them, China promises to restore Congolese infrastructure in exchange for the exploitation of Katanga’s mineral resources. Following on from the Memory series (2004-6) about […]

Hannah Whitaker’s subject matter tends toward the dramatic – snakes, the cosmos, volcanoes – content that brings along its own baggage. By forcing its co-existence with the more mundane, she approaches this imagery with a critical distance, placing natural theater alongside still lifes made from the detritus of everyday life. Drawing from her experience shooting […]

From 2006 through 2010, I traveled throughout the southeastern United States befriending, photographing, and interviewing a network of people who left cities and suburbs to live off the grid. Motivated by environmental concerns, religious beliefs, or predictions of economic collapse, they build their homes from local materials, obtain their water from nearby springs, and hunt, […]

It has its principal characters, its supporting cast and its scenery. The show goes on permanently before your eyes, with its staged duels and its kissing. Photographing this human comedy was a choice. I joined them, got into their rhythm, and patiently recorded the doings of the candidates for power. I observed the groups of […]

The Egypt 3000 project deals with the complex relationship between contemporary Egypt and its glorious past. The project began to take shape between October 2003 and June 2004, when I was working on a CNRS programme in Karnak, in the south of Egypt. The programme mainly consisted in identifying and photographing objects found in the […]

The Earth is neither round nor blue: it’s a cube, white, pierced through by a double door. In this cube, there are grottos of an immaculate whiteness and paper unicorns that wander across the valleys, steep flour mountains and women carrying, with the same momentum, a god-armchair; and then there are barren expanses, deserts of […]

Established in 1854 and state-approved in 1892, the SFP is one of the oldest photographers societies still active and one of the most important private collections of historical photo-graphs in Europe. Bringing together objects, images, books, periodicals and handwritten documents, the collection, today listed a historic monument, was formed according to its member’s activities: technical, […]

This exhibition brings together images from different periods of Arnaud Claass’s oeuvre. The relatively few works are displayed according to affinities rather than chronologically. There are photographs of American big cities in the 1970s and in 1990; others from colour sets from the year 2000; items from his ‘landscape’ period; from his phase exploring feelings; […]

The South Sudan officially became independent on 9 July 2011, following several decades of civil war opposing the Sudanese national army and rebel forces in the south, which culminated in a peace accord in 2005 and a UN-supervised secession process. The accession to independence was marked by three days of ceremonies in the new capital, […]

In view of the fact that several artists from the ENSP have made documentary forms, strategies and procedure central to their activities, this exhibition proposes to take stock of this fundamental aspect of contemporary work, using the collections of the Centre National des Arts Plastiques. The artists involved were at the school at different moments […]

There is no mystery; Dorothée Smith’s approach to the visible, at once luminarist and dark, is valid as an image of the uncertainty of sexual roles. Questions of gender, a current in philosophy over the last twenty years or more, occupy an important place in the intellectual development of her oeuvre. In her world, into […]

Evocative smiles firmly outlined on glacial and ambivalent pouting lips. She wants to live as though she were twenty years younger. In search of renewed youthfulness, she is as old as the other’s gaze makes her. Vivacious and wanting, tinged with artifice but without making the mistake of pathetic surgery and frozen narcissism, time seems […]

Aurore Valade builds her photographs around her models’ stories and tales. She stages their daily lives, hence questioning our ways of life and our private spaces. The photographs in this exhibition are constructed according to three classical painting genres: the portrait, interior scenes and vedute. Each composition is the fruit of a meticulous labour of […]

Since 1996, Jean-Louis Tornato has been developing his work around sleep using a camera with an automatic timer, infrared film and a flash. These allow light, which is invisible to the naked eye, to pass, and images to therefore be captured on opaque film while the subjects sleep undisturbed. The 36 images obtained, a summary […]

If Caspar David Friedrich had spent time in Iceland, I wonder if he would have populated his landscapes with little men dressed in red with matching helmets, or with the Dinky-toy sized Caterpillar tractors that you find in Pétur Thomsen’s photos. Why Caspar David? Perhaps because the great Romantic painter of vast landscapes, like the […]

A photographic landscape observatory consists of setting up, on a given territory, a photographic watch in order to study how landscape changes. A photographer on this type of project must produce an aesthetically pleasing work, which functions both as an art object and a documentary, understandable in other contexts (historical, sociological); the intention being that […]

Mehdi Meddaci’s plastic work keeps its distance, staying on the level of the “poetic” and bearing witness to its deep roots in Mediterranean space. It builds itself through successive strata, taking the form of devices or autonomous modules such as Corps Traversés (Pierced Bodies, 2007), Lancer une pierre, (To throw a stone, 2008) or Sans-titre, […]

On 11 March 2011, at 2.46 pm, a huge earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale, struck Tohoku, a coastal region in northeast Japan. The quake’s epicentre was off the Sanriku coast, filled with fishermen. The tsunami that followed destroyed almost all the inhabited areas along the coast and created apocalyptic scenes leading to the […]

Coming across a photograph by Erwan Morère is no light matter. Too bad, it’s too late. There you are – that’s it You know how it is, the feeling that you’ve been grabbed as you pass by – you’re hooked, carried away, and you say to yourself that if you get off while the thing’s […]

Halfway To White is not a quest for a virginal white but the empirical and tonal exploration of a multitude of whites. White is an overwhelmingly enigmatic subject: the same way it contains all colours, it can carry all significations and meanings. It is precisely through this complexity that this project hopes to touch upon […]

Klavdij Sluban, photographer, and Laurent Tixador, visual artist, are the first recipients of the Atelier des Ailleurs residency. The Atelier des Ailleurs is an arts residency in the exceptional context of the Kerguelen Islands. It aims to offer two artists conditions beneficial to creativity and experimentation in a place without a permanent population and almost […]

Alexandre Maubert’s work plays with a process of permanent deterritorialisation. From film to installation, photography to new media, his images constantly oscillate between diverse boundaries (geographic and aesthetic), as though to better invalidate or affirm them. The important element of these forms is that they function like so many contortions allowing the artist to approach […]

The model is one of the vital cogs in the couture house and ready-to-wear machines, reproduced ad infinitum from the earliest 19th century fashion illustrations through today’s magazines, advertising slots and videos. Shaped by and for fashion, she embodies all the contradictions of an industry torn between business and creativity and chronically committed to producing […]

Mireille Loup is a photographer, video artist and writer. She studied at the Institute Saint-Luc in Brussels and the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles. Since the beginning of the 1990s, she has been orchestrating these different mediums and practicing photomontage and digital design. She develops her fictions in visual and sound mechanisms, […]

Legend has it that one day the great master Zhuangzi – one of the founders of Taoism – fell asleep in a garden and had a dream. He dreamed that he was a very beautiful butterfly. After flitting here and there, the butterfly also fell asleep and also had a dream. It dreamed that it […]

Things began in Korea, a fair time ago, in black and white with an 8 x 10 view camera. The panel was already blank, and people were talking about the Bechers – Bernd and Hilla Becher. Over in Korea, people are either for or against the Bechers. Sunghee wondered whether a typology, a litany of […]

An exhibition between Marseilles and Jericho, not as a point of comparison but as a conversation between the images of one and those of the other, cities to tackle the more abstract issues of rhythm, light and, most particularly, time. To allow the image to escape from a single recognition for us to immerse ourselves […]

Marina Gadonneix’s work weaves a complex link between documentary and fiction through photographs of places given over to temporary neglect. In each of the series presented here, the artist explores the startling transition of a rugged territory to a fantastical image, of a form of evidence of reality to its most metaphorical mental construction. Landscapes […]

I love machines, the ones that fly, speak, count, or observe. I’m fascinated by the magical aspect of science; which seems to reduce the complexity of the world to a few mathematical formulae. There is a certain irony in making a visible and understandable image of such mysteries of the universe as waves, time, space, […]

Alain Leloup gives us an exhibition of works by Monique Deregibus and Arno Gisinger in which the two artists question the current way of looking at the traces of History, and the status of their own photographic images. Their works are hung from rails in the shape of an open figure of eight, which allows […]

The Jan Mulder Photography Collection from Lima, Peru, started in 2002 as an adventure in the realm of visual creation in the medium, in all its diversity. Further motivation came from the successful initiative of establishing a center for the teaching and promotion of photography as art in Peru. The outlook has been consistenly international […]

ALINARI, A PAST CONJUGATED WITH THE PRESENT   2012 marks the 160th anniversary of Fratelli Alinari, a family photographic studio from 1852 until 1920, then a shareholder firm and now a foundation, located in Florence. This continuity makes Fratelli Alinari the oldest firm in the world working in the field of photography, after having been […]

This exhibition is dedicated to the adventure of Contrejour, which drastically changed the French publishing landscape of the 1970s. It was an adventure carried along by the movement of a new spontaneous, nonconformist and committed kind of photography that proposed to lay the foundations of a genuine autonomous language. The exhibition also pays homage to […]

IMAGES In each of her works, Sylvia Ballhause studies both the aspects of photographic images and the conditions of their production. Most of the time, this research brings about the fortuitous or fervently desired discovery of a mysterious image or of an exceptional photographic apparatus. In her current works, she probes, in different ways, the […]

For the third year in a row BMW demonstrates its commitment to photography through the company’s partnership with Rencontres d’Arles. In this context, BMW takes pleasure in exhibiting the images of Alexandra Catiere, the 2011 winner of the BMW residency at the Nicéphore Niépce museum. Alexandra Catiere is a young artist from Belarus who was […]

Exhibition tour with the winners of the 2013 SFR Young Talents Award. Exhibition venue: Atelier de Mécanique, Rencontres d’Arles 2013.

THE LAST IMAGE I went to Istanbul. I spoke to blind people, most of whom had lost their sight suddenly. I asked them to describe the last thing they saw. VOIR LA MER I went to Istanbul, a city surrounded by water, I met people who had never seen the sea. I filmed their first […]

Trying in vain to depict the slobber of a panting animal, the Greek painter Protogenes ended up hurling a sponge at his picture. The accidental result was that he got the effect he was after. This anecdote, told by Pliny the Elder, is quoted by Pierre Soulages to explain the importance of “accidents” in painting. […]

For the Jean Renoir of Rules of the Game (1939), the world resembles a theatre where society urges men and women to be part of a spectacle by playing roles in it. As the French nursery rhyme says, they make a fleeting appearance and then they are gone. It was probably in this frame of […]

In his brand new work, Attraction, Christian Milovanoff plays a strange game based on reproducing his own archives and deconstructing them, and also on the idea of pure photographic recording, which he will also unpack and transform. Collecting images of the world, whether made by him or not, is no longer sufficient. What’s important is […]

This exhibition proposes a world tour of traditional architectures, known as ‘vernacular’, presented in models, films and photographs. It results from an encounter between two extraordinary entities who, it transpires, are perfectly complementary, to the point of becoming accomplices. On the one hand, there is an architecture collection, the property of the École Polytechnique Fédérale […]

A professional photo-reporter since 1998, the Italian Davide Monteleone won the 2011 European Publisher’s prize for photography awarded by five European photo-editors. For many years his beat was the countries of the northern Caucasus (Chechnya, South Ossetia, Georgia, Abkhazia, Dagestan, etc.) as they tried to cope with the collapse of the ex-Soviet Union. His work, […]

Between 2005 and 2010, I made regular visits to countries in the north of Europe – Finland, Sweden, Norway, Scotland, Denmark – and also to Paris and Beauvais. I had the impression of both being in a familiar place and also being plunged into a curiously unordinary world. This series is a mixture of portraits, […]

For twenty years, French photographer Denis Darzacq, a member of the VU’ agency, has constructed an oeuvre whose subtle and restless coherence has gone from strength to strength with every series: Ensembles (Together); Bobigny centre ville (with Marie Desplechin, Actes Sud, 2006); Nu (Naked); La chute (The Fall); Hyper. His latest series, Act, is outstanding. […]

Massimo Berruti took his investigative camera to the Swat Valley in Pakistan to observe the day-to-day life of the Lashkars, the traditional militias drawn up by former tribal warriors and supported by the Pakistani military. The Lashkars are the first line of defence against the Taliban. They contribute towards the peace and security of the […]

 One can recognize, in the images of Brigitte Bauer, a divide between the strong attention she pays to architecture, and a deep interest in the surrounding landscape, or more precisely in places and what they hold in terms of spoor and history. On the one hand we discern a focus on design, on construction, on […]

For my Discovery Award exhibition, I explore photography’s capacity for revision and misdirection through making changes to pre-existent erotic imagery. My most current series, Drape, uses vintage pin-up photographs as its source material. The women in these photographs are posed in interior domestic sets in front of curtains or drapes, offering a glimpse into intimate […]

Mes images ne questionnent pas uniquement les potentialités artistiques du médium photographique, elles explorent aussi sa capacité à écrire ou représenter le réel. Les premiers tirages que j’ai peints étaient des photographies de mon atelier recouvert de papier de couleur, plaqué aux murs, que j’ai ensuite photographié au grand format. Ce choix d’un papier coloré […]

The photographs of my series Weight of Experience are photographs of drawings I have made in certain places during certain times and under certain sensations. They are attempts to capture moments, to save experiences through the rhythm of the pencil. Everything we experience has an impact on us. And still, no matter how strong or […]

Photographs can be viewed like fixed points in the process of change and alteration, they allow the viewer to observe them freely and to step closer. One can gather trust and confidence in recognising them but simultaneously photographs have another kind of nature; a side turning towards the hidden and the unidentified. It´s difficult to […]

In 1975, the first edition of Josef Koudelka’s photographs was published by Robert Delpire in a book that became a myth and was never published again. In 2011, Josef Koudelka exhumed a former dummy of the same book and decided to re-publish it with a larger amount of photographs. Exceptional pictures, exhibited for the first […]

L’oeuvre de Pentti Sammallahti est une sorte d’odyssée de l’espace. La terre vue par lui, à hauteur d’homme ou d’oiseau, est blanche comme neige, pure comme elle. Curieusement peuplée d’animaux familiers qui tracent leur chemin dans la solitude d’un lieu indéterminé. Un lieu d’autant moins fini que ses panoramiques ne découpent pas un espace, ils […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 asking artists, critics, writers, academics, researchers, curators and media specialists to formulate their own inspirational visions of […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

In the SFR Young Talents’ Gallery, SFR is presenting a photography exhibition featuring the work of laureates of the SFR Young Talent / Rencontres d’Arles Prize and that of the laureate of the SFR Young Talent Prize 2011. The exhibition also features a selection of photos by Patrick Tourneboeuf, co-founder of Tendance Floue and sponsor […]

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, […]

 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 […]

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 […]

PHOTO FOLIO REVIEW LAUREATE IN 2010 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

 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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

 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 […]

 Minoru Hirata is perhaps best known for his brilliantly intense accounts of Japanese performance art – particularly the Neo-dada groups, Hi-Red Centre 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 recording the activities of the Japanese […]

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 […]

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 […]

Gabriel Figueroa Mateos (1907-1997) 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 generations of Mexicans […]

Graciela Iturbide is one of the most outstanding Mexican photographers on the contemporary world scene. Over a four-decade career she has built an oeuvre 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […] […]

JR is a French artist aged 28 who shows in the street all over the world and gets the attention of people who don’t usually visit museums. A mixture of art and gesture, his work raises issues of commitment, freedom, identity and boundaries. This uncommissioned “infiltration art” is to be found in the form of […]

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 […]

I’m somewhat dyslexic and have no talent for drawing, so writing and illustrating a journal doesn’t come naturally to me, but taking photographs always has. I started snapping photos at seven or eight, and fifty years later, I’m still at it. I mainly take pictures of my friends, people around me, buildings, landscapes, the food […]

PRISONS: BEHIND THE WALLS OF CLICHÉ Sixty thousand detainees in French prisons: surely the problem can’t be all that hard to solve! The Rencontres, in their own way, are part of the media, and this exhibition based on the report of France’s Inspector General of Prisons, Jean Marie Delarue, shows just how the world of […]

The Musée Réattu is devoting its summer exhibition to Pierre Jahan, some of whose works are in its collection. This is his first museum retrospective. Pierre Jahan is notable for the freedom of his approach and the considerable variety of an output embracing Surrealism and advertising collages, together with chronicles and reportages on the Paris […]

The starting-point for this project is Nice et Savoie, the superb book commissioned by Napoleon III to present to the people of these territories that were incorporated into France in 1860. The book, published in 1864 and today available for perusal at the county archives, contains ninety large prints of iconic locations in three counties: […]

This exhibition marks the ten-year anniversary of the L’Impensé series published by Actes Sud. Directed by Patrick Bouchain, the series consists of books at the intersection of civics, election politics, architecture and building-sites, and which propose another way of thinking about architecture and landscape. Devised as a vast installation, the exhibition occupies an entire 600m2 […]

PICTO CELEBRATES 60 YEARS OF CLOSE TIES WITH PHOTOGRAPGHERS Picto has its roots in an engaging story: how a close bond developed in the 1930s between Pierre Gassmann and Brassaï. Pierre was living in an attic garret, while Brassaï already occupied the choicest storeys of the same apartment block in Paris. A passion for pictures […]

Just as many writers say they have learned to read better by starting to write, François Halard has certainly honed his spectating skills by discov­ering photography. Halard’s precocious taste for certain objects, artworks and houses began a movement that has taken him around the world—from Palladian palaces to New York lofts, from the haunted houses […]

This exhibition presents, at the Magasin Électrique, the photos taken during trans-Siberian journeys in China, Mongolia and Russia and published in the book East to East (Transsibériades) by Klavdij Sluban, winner of the European Publishers Award for Photography in 2009. He travels by train in the Far East, searching for living creatures: fleeing animals and […]

Moscow is a vast city of busy people, traffic jams, a noisy subway, aggressive advertising, street lights, expensive shop windows and quiet loneliness. Like a huge teeming anthill where the inhabitants carry out their everyday functions like cogs in a machine. The subjects of my photographs are young people who left the provinces and moved […]

Sixty years of a weekly publication; that’s more than 3,000 covers, more than 3,000 tangible signs of the appearance and disappearance of phenomena, people, cultural objects some of which, after their hour of glory, have now fallen into oblivion, and others which continue to touch us. These covers are ephemeral images whose destiny is, perhaps, […]

Winner of the Photo Folio Review and Gallery award organised in tandem with the Fnac chain at the 2009 Rencontres, Lea Golda Holterman is showing her series Orthodox Eros. In posed pictures of the private lives of young Orthodox Jewish men, Holterman pulls off the incredible feat of breaching a major community taboo. Never before […]

PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE REVELATION OF EMOTION Sponsor for this 4th edition of the SFR Young Photo Talent exhibition is Spanish photographer Isabel Muñoz, and the theme—Photography and the Revelation of Emotion—reflects the quest behind her own work: big, varied subjects with the accent always on the feelings. Every one of the photographs here, many of […]

Special attention, 2010I wish to suggest here that artworks are not for interpretation, and that the opposite is true: they are interpreting objects, which convey thought to recipients. This is first the work of the artist, and then of the spectator, historian and essayist. It is also the work of the teacher, who, in an […]

Arles 2006. Raymond Depardon, the artistic director of that year’s Rencontres, presented the work of 16 young photographers. ‘These are the new generation of reporters and photographers—risk-takers, with a quickfire style, spending time on the ground. They’re concrete-minded, attentive and patient, not to say brave. Behind the scoop, you can sense the power and energy […]

What are young photographers up to in the twenty-first century? How do they see the world? How much do they respect, build on or reject tradition? As the digital revolution continues its relentless advance, demolishing longstanding practices in every domain of our field, curiosity builds as to how the new generation of photographers will react. […]

Leigh Ledare will present a series of conceptually driven photographic works under the title Double Bind. The framework for this project consisted of Ledare going on a 3-day trip to a country house alone with his ex-wife, during which time he created an archive of photographs of her. Two months following this initial trip, upon […]

The photographic and filmic works of Elad Lassry seek neutral visual and formal high ground from the various histories and institutions responsible for their origins. Liberated from these processes, Lassry’s autonomous specimens—human and animal portraits, fruit and veget­able still lifes, landscapes and everyday objects—breach the possibil­ity of a singular viewing by criticizing the frames, both […]

The photographs by artist Annette Kelm appear to perpetuate traditional forms of photographic representation in an unspectacular way: i.e. they comprise still lifes, portraits, object photographs, architectural and landscape photographs in moderate formats, which tend to be based on conventional studio or landscape practices. Annette Kelm works traditionally, her photographs are taken with analogue large- […]

Darius Khondji was born in Tehran in October 1955. A prominent cinematographer celebrated for his inventiveness, he was nominated for an Oscar for his work on Alan Parker’s Evita. He has been director of photography for more than twenty feature films including Chéri (2009), Funny Games U.S. (2007), My Blueberry Nights (2007), Zidane, A 21st […]

Trisha Donnelly is among a generation of artists to have come of age over the past decade or so, whose practice seems, as John Miller has observed, to be rooted in the incommunicability and opacity of Bas Jan Ader. Often taking the form of gatherings of objects in various media, from assembled sculptures to drawings […]

Taryn Simon’s practice is a stringent examination of the uses, non-uses, quasi-uses and misuses of photography in the institutions of society. The Innocents, for example, looks at the place of photography in the U.S. criminal justice system, documenting cases of wrongful convictions in which photography was in part culpable. More recently, An American Index of […]

Kazuo Shinohara (1925–2006) was a Japanese architect. In the late 1940s he built Japanese traditional wooden houses in a shopping center, later he built machine-structures such as The Tokyo Institute of Technology’s Centennial Hall in Tokyo (1987), the Ukiyo-e Museum in Matsumoto (1982) and the K2 Building in Osaka (1992) as well as more than […]

The enigmatic phrases that adorn the objects and hug the ground in Shannon Ebner’s black-and-white photographs are both curious and haunting. Her USA (2003), for instance, shows the word ‘NAUSEA’ erected in the brush abutting a barren waterfront as a pseudo-comical/pseudo-cynical reflection on the failed utopia of the American dream. Shaped from cardboard, flagging a […]

Hans-Peter Feldmann is one of the most influential artists of his generation. Escaping formalism all the way, Feldmann mistrusts all comforts of style and has, for more than three decades, worked to legitimise previously illegitimate art forms, from daily life to photo albums. In the 1980s, Feldmann’s activities moved from the art world to other […]

Solmaz Shahbazi refuses to give in to the age-old instinct to reveal, to demystify, to expound—subtly raising questions as to the entire documentary project as we know it. Istanbul’s ubiquitous gated communities serve as a point of departure in Perfectly Suited For You, a clinical look at the strenuously engineered domestic worlds that are increasingly […]

My videos and installations address apparently untenable aspects of human behaviour by exploring the need for community and by showing forms of resistance and the borders of self. Pushing narrative to its borders and allowing for a fractured chain of events to take place, the work functions as a vehicle for me to explore the […]

Taking found imagery and film as a point of departure in her work, Pascual creates photo-based sculptures, installations and images that employ strategies of artistic movements such as Conceptual Art, Surrealism, Minimalism and Arte Povera. Re-examining the viewer’s relationship to the photograph, Pascual is interested in exposing an image’s active presence by playing with the […]

Liz Deschenes was born in Boston and currently lives and works in New York City. She studied photography at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Deschenes began her artistic career in the realm of landscape photography. Her more recent work since 2001, while relying on traditional photographic techniques (and the history particular to […]

Anne Collier was born in Los Angeles and is currently based in New York. She received her B.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, and her M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles. While her work might on the surface be read as canny critiques of photography and images as they proliferate […]

Exhibition curator : Anne de Mondenard. Exhibition venue: Espace Van Gogh, Rencontres d’Arles 2010.

When Augusto Ferrari arrived in Argentina in 1914, he was an experienced artist at the height of his career. In Italy, he had already made extensive use of photography in his visual production. The oldest photographs in this group, which are also the most numerous and complex, are those made in the context of his […]

This exhibition is the third and final phase of a project begun in 2005: an analysis of the faking of photographs in Chinese propaganda as illustrated by a comparison of historical material from the 1950s through the 1970s. After five years spent sorting through the archives of hundreds of photo libraries and collections in China, […]

For more than half a century, the name Polaroid was synonymous with instantaneous photography. Amateurs and professionals alike loved the act of clicking the shutter, ejecting the print, and watching the image form. Moreover, the malleability of the process opened up all kinds of expressive possibilities. The Polaroid format, with its distinctive white frame, was […]

A proposition by the Musée Nicéphore-Niépce in Chalon-sur-Saône, and On-Situ.As times change, a museum devoted to photography has a mission to record shifts in a way that is unyielding to nostalgia and dissects photographic acts, facts and gestures. We all take photos: it is a practice we think we know and understand. And because this […]

DARKROOMS Strange, but at the same time so very sensual, Michel Campeau’s Darkrooms series generates an emotion at once sharp and diffuse: an exquisite melancholy. Begun just over four years ago, this project vigorously targets the death foretold of an artisanal form of photography. And while Campeau’s exploration of these precious darkrooms leads him to […]

In the years following World War I, a curious attraction made its appearance in fun fairs and amusement parks: the photo-shooting gallery. When the customer hit the bull’s-eye, he triggered a camera that caught him in action instantly; and instead of a bag of candy, a balloon or a teddy bear, he won a portrait […]

We know all his portraits: Patti Smith at Père-Lachaise cemetery; Prince in a desolate dressing-room; Muddy Waters in his hotel bed; Keith Richards and Mick Jagger joking in a visibly empty plane… Tricky and the Kills, far from their official image, captured in unique, offbeat moments that strip them bare and shed light. In the […]

Mick Jagger, the world’s most photographed performer, has agreed to have the Rencontres d’Arles present the first exhibition covering his career as seen by the leading portraitists of our time. For almost fifty years the universal rock star’s looks have been a major factor in his appeal, with his face and way of moving helping […]

CROSSWAYS A man of pictures if ever there was one, Marin Karmitz—filmmaker, producer and creator/director of the MK2 cinema network—is primarily known for his passionate bond with the moving image. It is less well known that Karmitz, who during his period of political activism was also a photographer, has compiled an outstanding collection of artworks […]

The issue of identity touches all of my work, no matter what media I might be working with: painting, photography, sculpture or video. Every individual’s identity is formed by a number of disparate and even conflicting identities. The priority we give to just one of those identities over the others depends on the value system […]

«… Where is my neighbourhood? Who stole my pain from me? My moon, on what little spot, as in times gone by, do you pour down your joyful light? » * I paint the bodies of my models with red ink. Then, using the same ink, I hand-colour their photos. Blood on blood. The idea […]

I’m interested in the part the media image plays in the recollection of violent events, especially as documentary. There’s something about the involuntary aesthetic of war documentaries: a common factor, something that’s present in all wars. It seems to reverberate at moments when nothing is happening, in down times, in the nothingness hovering over armoured […]

Ernst Haas was unquestionably one of the 20th century’s best-known photographers, but—paradoxically—one aspect of his personality has remained unknown. His name is usually associated with the vividly coloured images that the illustrated press fed on for decades: work which not only featured in the most influential European and American magazines, but also generated a steady […]

Entre el Cielo y la Tierra.There is no word for a mother who has lost her son. There is no way of naming such a pain. In my country’s recent history, during the years of the military dictatorship, the violence of state terrorism took thirty thousand lives. And in a perverse design of the future […]

The presence of a Léon Ferrari retrospective in a church is a paradox verging on the miraculous: here we have a famous, ninety-year-old artist who has devoted a large part of his working life to studying and implacably critici- sing the Catholic Church from its origins up to the present day. Ferrari’s œuvre foregrounds the […]

Borrowing its title from the song by punk band X-Ray Spex, the exhibition I Am A Cliché looks at the status of the image and its metamorphoses within the punk aesthetic. From Andy Warhol’s silent Screen Tests to Mapplethorpe’s iconic portraits of Patti Smith; from Jamie Reid’s and Linder’s subversive photocollages to the lacerated reinventions […]

In 2005, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was unexpectedly elected as Iran’s president, I began a photo project on Iranian society. I felt that with the arrival of this populist and extremist to the presidency, the divide between how the West viewed Iran and the country I knew was going to grow at a very fast pace. […]

Photographic negatives are drawn in charcoal on paper. Roads, tunnels and the countryside viewed from a car window refer to travelling and passage, but the reversed tonalities undermine a simple reading. The sun, sources of light and fireworks conserve their association with growth, illumination and celebration, but simultaneously allude to burning and destruction. Negatives are […]

Nan and I first spoke about the show in Arles around Christmas. My first instinct was to do exactly what we’re doing now. Nan’s wasn’t. And then my ideas began to change as well. Each of our in-between ideas involved a much more typical gallery hanging, the only difference being each of us wanted to […]

Jean-Christian Bourcart settled in New York in 1997, after training in photography and psychology. His pictures convey recurrent themes (transgression, clandestinity, obsession, movement) and always aim to lay bare people’s hidden secrets, their activities and traces. Traffic (2003), a series of portraits of motorists stuck in traffic jams in New York City, displays waiting and […]

In the Hyper series, Darzacq photographs young street dancers performing various leaps in the hypermarkets of Rouen and Paris. In these images, the ecstatic and ultimately aimless movements of the dancing bodies disrupt the disciplined organisation of the superstores, obstructing the routes marked out for and by the consumer subjects. This is motion driven by […]

For Laurence Leblanc, the photographic act is constructed by gradually impregnating herself with the subject and its environment; the resulting picture stems, in turn, from a meticulously constructed process. Extremely attentive to the violence of the world and to the chaos of destinies, she strips her gaze of all documentary curiosity—she knows that others have […]

Italian photographer Giorgia Fiorio is conducting a long-term survey and reportage project on forms of belief and contemporary spiritual rites around the world. Faithful to her approach— her decade-long work on closed male communities lingers in the memory— she has travelled several continents and absorbed many cultures in order to record and explore the manifestations […]

The fruit of a six-year quest by Turkish artist Attila Durak, is an arresting photographic journey among the peoples of Turkey and Anatolia. Capturing their faces in a mood of warm rapport, Durak sheds full light on the country’s riches and cultural diversity. The word ‘Ebru’ means ‘marbled paper’. This millennium-old pictorial technique, blending paint […]

12 September 2000: I am fifty, chatting under a lime tree, and there’s a lot of noise—insects and the wind making it hard to hear our small talk about the weather or tonight’s menu. That’s how I used to imagine the unimaginable in the 1980s: the year 2000, turning fifty’. The unsettling thing about fast-forwarding […]

JE SUIS LE CHIEN PITIÉ (I am the dog Pity). This work is the outcome of a specific encounter and of the secret affinities every artist nurtures with some radically different form of expression. Writer Laurent Gaudé and photographer Oan Kim have created a narrative in which a clash between photographs and text can generate […]

The particular journeys of Half Life encompass New York, Havana, Berlin, Naples, Paris, Warsaw and Cracow among others, but Michael Ackerman has been on the path of erasing geographical and other distinctions for some time. It’s certainly evident in his earlier book, Fiction. Half Life continues the trajectory away from the constraints of reportage and […]

In a tribute to André François the painter, sculptor and photographer, this exhibition brings together 60 pieces of his work, produced after his oeuvre was totally destroyed in his blazing studio in 2002, as well as original drawings by some forty illustrators and graphic designers who knew him well. Their drawings bear witness to the […]

At Claude Perdriel’s request, Robert Delpire took over the editing of Spécial Photo No. 8. Published as a supplement to Le Nouvel Observateur in 1977, this series was a landmark in the history of photography publishing in terms of image quality (Lewis Carroll, Diane Arbus, Disfarmer, Richard Avedon and Cartier-Bresson) and writing (with authors like […]

The connection with reality is the main issue photographers have been facing ever since the medium was invented. The exhibition Scandaleux réel (Outrageous Reality), to be presented at the Galerie Aréna this summer will tackle the question from the point of view of the relationship between image and memory and of the way or ways […]

Plural perspectives by The French National School of Photography of Arles / Provence-Alpes-Côte D’azur Collection Of Contemporary Art. Everywhere—in the heart of towns and cities, in villages and natural beauty spots—students from the National School of Photography have captured on-stage images of performances or exhibitions of music, opera, theatre, dance and the visual arts. These […]

UNE ATTENTION PARTICULIÈRE (An Attentive Eye). These are the works by the budding young artists just graduated from the French National School of Photography (ENSP) in Arles. They offer a diverse range of artistic experiences, and affirm multiple and singular presences in the world. Without neglecting what has already been done, or the tribulations of […]

For the 40th edition of the festival the LUMA Foundation is coproducing an exhibition in the Grande Halle of work by American artist Roni Horn, in collaboration with the Collection Lambert in Avignon.  In the context of the Rencontres d’Arles, the LUMA Foundation presents an exhibition by Roni Horn. Works shown include a.k.a. (2008-2009), Becoming […]

After spending his childhood in Rome, Elger Esser joined the Bechers’ class at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie. These strong, complementary figures had a lasting influence on his work. His memories of Rome include long walks to places with no obvious character, but where he could observe the changes brought on by light, wind, clouds and the […]

This is not about nostalgia, regrets, controversy or judgements. Not even about a particular story, significant and still to be written. In piecing together our recollections and asking others for theirs, rummaging through archives, questioning both key players and the public, we simply wanted to remind the world—and ourselves—about the first and still number one […]

At the Rencontres d’Arles I have come to know many artists of all sorts, whose works have been acquired to enrich the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale. The governing idea of the show titled Tout ce qui est à voir est ce que vous voyez (‘What you see is all there is to see’) is […]

The 80 photographs making up this retrospective in the Chapelle Sainte-Anne present a specific aspect of the work of Willy Ronis: a deep awareness of the nature of images, despite his being traditionally categorised within mainstream Humanism. For Ronis photography was not an end in itself but a means of expressing his experience of the […]

Presented by Christian Lacroix. Guest curator of the Rencontres d’Arles in 2008. NATURES MORTES (STILL LIFES). One of the main features of Véronique Ellena’s work, visible in the earliest stagings of daily life that she produced in the 1990s, is the ability to meet others, understand them intimately and value them. This faculty is also noticeable […]

Presented by Martin Parr. Photographer, collector and exhibition curator. Guest curator of the Rencontres d’Arles in 2004. As you drive along the main roads in the country, by the roadsides or out in the fields you can see farmhouses crowned with storks’ nests, looking as if they had been hoisted into the tops of towering trees. It […]

Presented by Giovanna Calvenzi. Director of photography for various Italian magazines, exhibition curator, artistic director of the Rencontres d’Arles in 1998. 20.12.53–10.08.04 20.12.53–10.08.04 was born at a moment while I had eyes only for my mother’s photos. She had just disappeared, and it was my huge desire to be close to her and to spend with […]

Presented by Christian Caujolle. Journalist, former art director of Libération’s photography department, fondation de l’agence VU’, artistic director of the Rencontres d’Arles in 1997.METHOD METHOD is a personal exploration and externalisation of my uncharted emotional and psychological world. Although a heterosexual male, I have created Shauna as a means through which I enter this troubled and, […]

Presented by Joan Fontcuberta. Photographer, artistic director of the Rencontres d’Arles in 1996. IN THE SHADOW OF PHOTOGRAPHY Art is for me a way to communicate a few little things I have found out about the world. These are usually banal details from daily life, in which resides hidden poetry. During six years of studying photography […]

Presented by Michel Nuridsany. Journalist, artistic director of the Rencontres d’Arles in 1995. SPACE BETWEEN The photographic installation Space Between (2007–2009) comprises diverse images: some taken from documentaries or archives, others made from scratch, and even some downloaded or rephotographed. There are photographs of a meteorite made from Sagex, fake craters on Mars, a contre-jour against […]

Presented by Bernard Miller. Heritage curator and cultural affairs adviser to the president of the Bouches-du-Rhône Departement. General manager of the Rencontres d’Arles from 1995 to 1998. SYRIE In May 2006 the French Cultural Centre in Damascus invited me to work on a series of urban landscape photographs of the outskirts of Damascus and Aleppo. Beforehand […]

Presented by Louis Mesplé. Journalist, critic and photography commentator on the rue89 website, former artistic director of Rencontres Africaines of Bamako. Artistic director of the Rencontres d’Arles from 1991 to 1993. The movie theatre is a place ‘where the real world changes into a mere image’, and where ‘mere images become real beings’—a social-hallucination venue where ‘the […]

Presented by Agnès De Gouvion Saint-Cyr. Inspector-General of Photography at the Ministry of Culture and Communication, artistic director of the Rencontres d’Arles in 1990. HOSPITAL. These photos raise the question of the Other in human society in general and in Palestinian society in particular, by documenting aspects of the life of Palestinian psychiatric patients at the […]

Presented by Claude Hudelot. Journalist, artistic director of the Rencontres d’Arles in 1988 and 1989. PHANTOM LANDSCAPE. For the first creation of Phantom Landscape I used the title ‘Mountain Water’, a symbolic element in China. This title includes two things literally: one is the city I live in, the other is mountain water (meaning ‘landscape’ in […]

Presented by Christian Milovanoff. Photographer and lecturer at the National School of Photography in Arles since 1983. Through nocturnal tracking shots whose attention fluctuates, Nightshot delivers several unlinked shots, fixed in the darkness like photograms from the print of a feature-length movie. In a casting of roles that are captured in the often subdued reality […]

Presented by Arnaud Claass. Lecturer at the l’École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles. MARKO POLO (2008). In 2004, Poland became a full member of the EU. This has given a great opportunity to the Polish people to travel in search of better-paid work and a new beginning. Many travelled to Ireland, reaching up to 200,000 […]

Presented by Alain Desvergnes. Photographer, founder of the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie and artistic director of the Rencontres d’Arles from 1979 to 1982. LES TEMPESTAIRES Witches still meet by ponds to brew storms. This begetting of bad weather is done mainly at night: armed with long poles or huge wooden shovels, pock-faced characters […]

Presented by Bernard Perrine.STYLE AND FEELING. Léon Herschtritt? Since you can’t pin him down to any school, movement or trend, the best thing is to imitate the young couple he photographed at night, pointing at a Paris metro map, wondering where they were, comforted by the fact of being together and in love. Herschtritt, too, […]

Presented by Lucien Clergue, photographer, founder and former director of the Rencontres d’Arles.HOW ODD this photographer is, pointing his camera at the perpetual, unsettling muteness of things, showing them to us not as real presences but as they perceptibly vanish. It is in this evanescence, perhaps, that lies the true nature of tragedy. Jean-François Spricigo’s […]

Annelies Strba has been photographing members of her family for several decades now. Partial fuzziness, over-exposure and graininess characterise the shots taken for Shades of Time, which first brought her greater prominence. The photographs, apart from landscape shots, primarily depict her children Sonja, Linda and Samuel as well as her partner and the grandmother of […]

How calmly she behaved that day, Bought a knife, still had a price tag on it, Asked when the next Boston Ohio train passed through, Found a spot, a blind curve. I was told she lay down and waited The death-record says she lay In front of the train 5:38 on an April afternoon. During […]

How did we do this ? These are photos of my mother’s time, and of her mother’s time, and still, of the first woman in our line to set foot on Freedom’s Shore. These are the photos that racists took. Captured in the photos are crimes that no nation could defend: not a nation imperilled by […]

From adolescence through to his retirement from his job as an electrician, Bohdan Holomicek has documented his own life, along with an entire segment of Czech Republic history. Part of his work—about his friend and neighbour Vaclav Havel— inevitably became a unique document. Their close friendship began in 1972. Despite their different destinies, the photographer/electrician […]

BONE LONELY A man stands in the middle of destruction, feeling lonely to an unbelievable degree, bone lonely. He makes deaf images during his blind walks. Dwelling with thoughts about the loss in all conflicts, the feeling that all systems fail and the certainty that nothing lasts forever. He wonders what light shines in loneliness, […]

The Blue Room, Eugene Richards’ first work in colour, is a moving and eloquent study of the abandoned and forgotten houses of rural America. Abandoned houses stand mute and solitary in out-of-the-way places, wherever things seemingly haven’t worked out for people. To those quickly passing by, the timeworn structures can be seen as fearful places, […]

11/09/1965. On 9 November, 1965, the lights went out in New York. A power outage began around 5.30 pm, hitting this city’s millions as well as a wide swathe of Canada and the US states of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Jersey and New York. In total, 25 million people across 200,000 […]

Joan Fontcuberta’s new project Blow up Blow up takes as its starting-point the 1966 film by Michelangelo Antonioni, in which the director explores the boundary between objective reality— the reality one might be tempted to liken to photography—and illusion, through an unorthodox murder. Using photograms of a 35mm duplicate of the film, Fontcuberta continues to […]

In February this year, when François suggested once again showing the 1987 works at the Rencontres d’Arles 2009, I first responded sceptically. But after brief reflection, I was extremely excited by the idea of using them as the starting-point of a space that would reach beyond this period’s boundaries, show significant nineties work and extend […]

This series of photographs by Martin Parr shows the different ways in which people display their wealth. Choosing various locations across the world, and a range of situations including art fairs and race-courses, Parr has selected scenarios in which people are comfortable showing off their wealth. Designer clothes, champagne and parties are all part of […]

‘When you look at my photographs, you are looking at my thoughts’. These words are the key to interpreting the entire oeuvre of Duane Michals. An oeuvre that matches his living philosophy—a rare thing among artists. Fifty years ago, when he was starting out, this sentence was already the basis of images that aimed to […]

” When François and I met the first time to discuss the possibility of my curating a photography show, I quickly reeled off the names of my favourite photographers. That’s when I realised that so many of them are dead. I thought it made more sense to leave the room for living photographers who are […]

Using a visual medium to record something as intangible as faith, as subjective as spirituality, may seem like a paradox; however, it is a challenge that has allowed me to investigate boundaries of genre. By focusing primarily on the sites themselves—their delicate structures, ephemeral materials and organic connection to the desert landscape—I hope to reveal […]

Here are some new pictures. They’re big, they’re eleven of them, and they’re folded in eight, and are attached to the wall with pins. I’ll tell you how they came and give you a list of things I’ve been thinking about in the midst of making them. Over the Christmas/New Year holidays this year I […]

For ten years Jim Goldberg worked closely with and documented runaway teenagers in the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles. He expanded upon a style of documentary photography using original photographs, text and a variety of other elements such as home-movie stills, family snapshots, drawings, diary entries and discarded belongings. Goldberg’s work tells profoundly […]

In 2005 and 2006, I followed four non-governmental organisations (NGOs), which understand football as a medium to attract children from the streets and offer support and motivation. They use the power of sport to transform the lives of some of the most socially deprived youngsters. Furthermore, they help to create a perspective for the future. […]

“Never any sleep and no more waking: a dreadful uninterrupted flow.” (Antonin Artaud, OC, XXII, p.157) A body, no mind, no soul, no heart, no family, no families of beings, no groups, no brotherhoods no involvement, no communion of saints, no angels, no beings, no dialectic, no logic, no syllogistics, no ontology, no rules, no […]

Absurd, all I did was search the web for the most dangerous city in the USA. I wanted to find that strange energy given off by places where rules and social constraints have been abolished or weakened. A sense of freedom mixed with the excitement of danger. Or maybe I wanted to check that it’s […]

Composed in its entirety of photographs, written anecdotes and ephemera, the materials from Leigh Ledare’s first book, Pretend You’re Actually Alive, assert themselves as a searingly intimate investigation of the artist’s complex and ambivalent relationship with his mother. At the age of 50, Ledare’s mother, a once-promising prodigy ballerina, began to cultivate an exceedingly sexualised […]

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” Marcel Proust   It’s an urge and a necessity to photograph what I experience and what surrounds me. It doesn’t matter who I’m with, where I am: what matters are the encounters, landscapes and details I have to relate […]

I could parody Picasso by saying, ‘Photography is stronger than me, it always gets me to do what it wants’. In this case I take photographs with traditional colour film (black and white would be pointless) of a bullfight or a nude model, then I roll the film back, carefully lining up the marks, and […]

Every generation has its war. Folk Wisdom   Sentimental explanation, 1941. I was three years old and I can still remember the bombings, the howling sirens and the searchlights in the wonderful, dark blue sky. Blue, blue, light blueFor some reason we think that one generation will be spared a war. I see this blue […]

I arrived in Tokyo for the first time in Spring 2006. My friend Sara had found a job there and I decided to go with her to discover the city she grew up in—a totally new environment I knew close to nothing about and where nothing was particularly attractive. At first I felt invisible. I […]

How do you capture the monumental scale of Britain’s largest ever construction project? The completion of High Speed 1, the building of a new corridor for the high-speed railway ending at the cathedrallike terminus of St. Pancras International, has been well documented along the way. But Greg Horton, the art director hired by London & […]

To people familiar with Brian Griffin’s portraiture, his exhibition The Water People may come as something of a surprise. Portraits make up less than half of the images in both, and only a handful of them tap into his expertly noirish style. The other portraits are distorted abstractions taken through water, and many of the […]

My life as a photographer began in 1966, working in a factory making conveyors, in the Black Country, an area close to Birmingham. The factory foreman proposed that I join the local camera club. Why he introduced the subject of photography I have no idea. To be truthful, although I joined the local camera club […]

Two years ago (or maybe a little more) my friends Hébel and Monterosso asked me if they could put on a retrospective of what we’d been up to for the last 127 years (or maybe a little less). Tributes and medals aren’t really my thing, so I said no. Really no. During the few years […]

I like to look. I want to have the innocent eyes of a child and look at the world for the first time. I noticed I have a growing desire to be dog-like and primitive. Someone photographing his experiences and memories on the fringes of identity, before they become more complex. Understand that you find […]

That which resists our process of cognition we call ‘reality’. We always wish to grasp the world as a whole. But the resistance of ‘reality’ is so fierce that we counter it through dividing the world into small parts, and from these we then attempt to understand the whole; however, the problem is that our […]

An American artist little known in Europe, Jeffrey Silverthorne has for nearly forty years been considering the body and its representation. His photography, whether in black-and-white or colour, borrows from both documentary and staging techniques with a fluent, exuberant feel for investigation. He tirelessly explores the particular way in which photography can play at once […]

THE ACADÉMIE DU SPECTACLE EQUESTRE DE VERSAILLES. THE RIDER’S ROAD It’s only just five years since neighings and the ring of horseshoes resounded again in the north wing of the main stable at the Palace of Versailles, unused for over fifty years. Founded by Bartabas in February 2003, the Académie du Spectacle Equestre is already […]

‘Independence is my school’. The words might sound glib had they not been uttered by a well-known art gallery owner in post-war Paris. Paul Facchetti continually and discreetly photographed his surroundings. He was certainly adventurous, being Europe’s first exhibitor, in 1952, of Pollock in his gallery at 17 Rue de Lille. With a pronounced taste […]

  In the gripping text introducing the book of this exhibition, Haitian writer Lyonel Trouillot warns that ‘You can’t photograph a country. But looking through the photos on show here you come to the instructive conclusion that Haiti, a little like all countries, really is an impossible entity. It is this impossibility that Jane Evelyn […]

  Only someone with Mimmo Jodice’s enormous experience – his tried and tested knowledge of photography’s infinite facets and possibilities, his endlessly introspective exploration of the notion of territory – could have achieved this recreation of quintessential Italy and the aura of its unique artistic heritage. Mimmo Jodice is fond of quoting Fernando Pessoa’s ‘But […]

Forty-five years of Stalin-style dictatorship, self-sufficiency and international isolation made 20th-century Albania a land without images. The collapse of the regime in the early 1990s led Greek photographer John Demos, disguised as a bus-riding tourist, to discreetly record change in the country’s cities and towns. He later returned several times as a press correspondent. Nonetheless […]

Exhibition proposed by the museon ArlatenIn the mid-19th century a sea-salt extraction complex was set up around the Étang de Giraud in the Camargue. Covering several thousand hectares, this was the largest saltworks on the entire Mediterranean rim. And in this isolated part of the Rhône Valley was created the workers’ village of Salin-de-Giraud, designed […]

Exhibition proposed by the Magazine SportBegun in the summer of 2007 by Raymond Depardon and the magazine Sport, with the backing of the Lagardère publishing group, the photographic project Les Sentiers de l’Olympe (Paths to Olympus) shows French athletes preparing for the 2008 Olympiad. The twelve photographers were chosen by Depardon from among the rising […]

Exhibition proposed by the French National School of Photography: Promotion 2008 These three young photographers have been chosen from the graduation class at the National School of Photography in June 2007. Selected by a jury from a longer list drawn up by the school’s teaching team, they are the first to figure in what is […]

Exhibition proposed by the French National School of Photography Marcus Tomlinson enjoys playing with appearance, disappearance, lightness and evanescence. One of the techniques he uses is lenticular imaging, a way of including two pictures in one. In the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence, an anonymous 17th-century work shows alternately – according […]

These images are part of a larger archive which the artist has been working on for several years. They are a series of landscapes that try to tell stories from different cities around the world. These settings act as a background to situations dominated by human figures, or the absence of them, which happen to […]

Daniel Riera’s photographs are about experience and experiences. Sometimes wonderful, sometimes funny, sometimes dark, sometimes stunning, sometimes nothing, but sometimes even more than that, they are always highly personal and usually very moving experiences, based on the many mixed emotions that the combination of eye, brain, finger and camera can capture when orchestrated by the […]

Some people can see through things. They spot them, go through them, unveil them and show them back to us under a different light. Some of these people are photographers. And one of them is Leila, a conspiratorial eyelash behind the shutter, a thin eyelid, a red-haired head that sees things and goes through the […]

I cannot deny the influence photographing dead bodies and crime scenes for six years had on the way that I approached photographing my born-again Christian family. These photographs similarly approach the subject-matter of my family with detachment of clinical observation. I am attracted to the already existing pristine, saccharine pastel interiors of the upper-middle-class home. […]

The pleasure of observing, together with the emotional implications associated with the position of spectator, are the artistic focus that pervades all of Martina Sauter’s work, weaving behind her images like an all-embracing law that places the conventional view of everyday things into a perspective imbued with suspense. The artistic process used by the photographer […]

Marla Rutherford’s work references many genres of photography – fashion, advertising, glamour portrait, fetish, film stills, Pirelli calendars – to present highly original fictional and performative portraits that play off incongruous worlds, often interrupting a domestic scene with a fantasy image or placing a seductive fetish portrait in a commonplace, everyday scene. Marla Rutherford’s photographs […]