France hosts photography festival “Meetings in Arles”

Arles, France hosts the traditional annual photography festival “Meetings in Arles”. visiting him, Esther Steinbock discovered not at all what she expected to see today at exhibitions of art so sensitive to modernity.

One of the most important, although not the most visited, exhibitions of the festival is “Portraits” in the Arlesian Museum of Réattu. Photographs from the collection of Florence and Damien Bachelot, which contains many very famous images, “invaded” the exposition of the classical museum, which grew out of the collection of works of the local native Jacques Reattu that was once left to the city. The reception of the intervention of contemporary art in the academic gallery is far from new, but here it has independent significance – the fact is that in the middle of the last century it was at the Reattu Museum that a department for the study of photography was created. This was in fact the first time that photography has become the subject of attention of this kind of cultural institution. The photography collection of the Reattu Museum gave birth to the idea of ​​turning Arles into an international center for photography – and now it is hard to imagine photography without the annual “Meetings in Arles”, inscribed in the numerous interiors of the town, from the “Van Gogh Court” and medieval chapels to the halls of the recently opened and amazing even the sophisticated imaginations of the LUMA contemporary art centre.

This year, the leitmotif of the festival was the theme of cinema related to photography. Wim Wenders came up with the exhibition “My Polaroid Friends”, dedicated to his almost half a century old film “An American Friend”, in which the hero took instant pictures with a Polaroid, according to the director, the first sign of the current total digitalization of images. Another exhibition is dedicated to Agnès Varda, who successfully combined directing with photography, the documentary realism of her cinema obviously rhymes with her style of capturing reality – and at the exhibition of her works, the image of the 1960s and 1970s that encouraged humanity is revealed in its charming, nostalgic integrity. Another exhibition tells about scrapbooking, which also left the cinema and life with the advent of computers – handmade diaries dedicated to the creation of a particular film. These documents seem to represent a parallel to the paintings, but an independent montage, sometimes rhyming with the main work, and sometimes arguing in absentia with it. Informal life on the other side of the camera is always interesting, and if we are talking about paintings by Derek Jarman, Stanley Kubrick or Jim Jarmusch, then the pandemonium at the exhibition is easily explained.

At the current “Meetings in Arles” reportage, documentary filming is almost completely absent. The festival deliberately leaves the fixation of dramatic reality with its wars and destruction, violence and hunger to photojournalists. And although all this is present in Arles in one way or another, it comes second or even third. From the amusing – the project of the Brazilian Rosangela Regnault “Good Apple, Bad Apple”: hundreds of small photographs of monuments to Lenin, found by the author on the Internet. Framed, with comments made directly on the photographs with a felt-tip pen, relating to the history, location or condition of the monument, they are folded into a motley story of the creation and decline of the Leninist cult. The black and red apples that mark the photos refer to the history of the communist movement in Brazil – during the military dictatorship, the communists were called “rotten apples.” So these Ilyichs have nothing to do with New York or iPhones.

What has to do with New York is the Casa Susanna exhibition. In this city, in 2004, at a flea market, art dealers found a collection of several hundred photographs from the 1950s and 1960s, which depicted men in women’s clothing. Behind this find, an exciting story about the cross-dresser community in America was revealed. They were middle-class men – employees, pilots, engineers with wives and children, who, as a rule, did not even know that fathers of families like to dress up as women. Then there was no talk of today’s freedom of morals, so the “second life” was a secret, intimate, hidden from prying eyes. These men, whose real names we most often do not know and who, most likely, are no longer in the world, did not look much like today’s heroes of the carnival “prides”. They tried on the images of exemplary American housewives, called themselves Doris, Susanna, Feona, Virginia, gathered for joint secret holidays, dressed up, took a lot of pictures and even published an underground magazine “Transvestia”, the numbers of which have been preserved. Now the word “transvestite” is considered pejorative – and curators specially remind about it. They also believe that that community can be considered the first community of “trances”, although not fighting for their rights, but paving the way for today’s recognition of the diversity of identities. However, when you look at the photographs, you do not think about the principles of tolerance and tolerance. You think about the other side of life, about the fragility of human happiness, about the right to a secret, about how many secrets people are forced to keep. And that all this sooner or later disappears without a trace.

The exposition of the famous American Gregory Crewdson crowns the top list of exhibitions. His meticulously constructed, hyper-realistic scenes from American life can be seen not only as paintings, but also as performances. In these static compositions, representing people in seemingly ordinary, but carefully detailed interiors, some kind of mystery is felt: it is not clear what the life depicted by Crewdson really strives for – eternal harmony or instant catastrophe.