Vibrant colors, a bewigged face, an inquisitive gaze…: Self-Portrait as Cindy by Finnish photographer Emma Sarpaniemi sets the tone for the 54th Rencontres de la Photographie d'Arles. Beyond the preeminence of women (artists or curators, as is the trend…), the distancing of the gaze and the staging of reality are key features of this new festival, which offers no fewer than 44 exhibitions this year. Among them, at the Sainte-Anne church, is… Søsterskap – Contemporary Nordic Photographers ", celebrating female subjectivity through the work of artists active since the 1980s in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.

At the Archbishop's Palace, one will happily immerse oneself in the strangeness and the almost pictorial, plastic beauty of the " Assemblies " by Saul Leiter (1923-2013). Street photos like no other, relegating silhouettes to the background, amidst plays of reflections, transparencies and blurs, flat areas of color and almost abstract nested perspectives.

"GEOGRAPHIES OF THE GAZE"

At the Saint-Trophime cloister, visitors can see the unsettling sedimentations of Camargue landscapes created both on-site and in the studio by Eva Nielsen, in collaboration with Marianne Derrien, as part of the BMW ART MAKERS program. This program invites an artist/curator duo to produce experimental work exploring the image and its spatial arrangement. Merging optical and hydrogeological phenomena through superimpositions of screen-printed images and paintings, the Franco-Danish artist's new series, Insolare, multiplies the territories (of image and landscape) that transport us into the phantom spaces of memory.

Also at the Saint-Trophime cloister, the exhibition of photographs of the quays of Pointe Courte, the fishing district of Sète, which Agnès Varda used for the filming of her first film, La Pointe Courte, in 1954, also blurs the lines between techniques. These location scouting photographs, with their highly graphic and realistic style, capture the very essence of this film, a precursor to the New Wave, in which Agnès Varda "shots tracking shots in a 2CV before Chabrol, Truffaut, Godard and Louis Malle" and where, after initially opting for color, she "switches to black and white, which makes reality more abstract."

"FROM FILMS TO IMAGES"

« From films to images ", is the title of one of the themes of these Encounters which offers, in addition to the sumptuous black and white of Agnès Varda, the opportunity to rediscover the photographic works of Wim Wenders (at the Van Gogh space) as well as the photographs " designed like movie scenes » by Gregory Crewdson (in La Mécanique Générale).
To mark the centenary of Diane Arbus's birth, LUMA Arles presents "Constellation", an exhibition of more than 450 images (some of which are previously unseen) by the master of the strange.

1 Patrick Roegiers, Nouvelle vague, novel, published by Grasset, 2023

FROM JULY 3 TO SEPTEMBER 24, 2023
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