Les Rencontres d'Arles 2011 – review
Europe's high-profile photography festival is a disjointed affair this year, but it's worth making the trip to see the stunning showcase of Mexican work
Enrique Metinides's photograph of the Regis Hotel, Centro Historico, Mexico City, after the earthquake of 19 September 1985. Photograph: Enrique Metinides
The subtitle of this year's Rencontres d'Arles – arguably Europe's most important photography festival – could easily have been "What Is Photography For?" It is a question being asked with some intensity and a degree of mischief on the internet via the likes of Google Images, Flickr and Photobucket, and by a host of artists for whom photography's vast archive of the strange, the beautiful and the mundane is an endless treasure trove to be reappropriated, manipulated and added to ad infinitum.
The fast and loose approach by a new generation of digital artists is one of the dominant themes of this year's Rencontres, alongside a historical trawl through Mexican photography from the revolution to the present day. It makes for a sometimes uneasy mix of the serious and the wilfully amateur. Visitors here are typically photography buffs from across Europe and the US, and seem younger and trendier this year. The work reflects the festival-goers: I often felt I was wandering through a global village of images, with the unevenness and lack of a guiding current, a metaphor for photography's ongoing identity crisis.
For all that, it is almost worth popping over to Arles just for Republic, the festival within the festival that is devoted to Mexican photography. The logical place to begin is the Espace van Gogh, where two extraordinary exhibitions sit side by side – Mexico: Photography and Revolution and a retrospective devoted to Graciela Iturbide, an extraordinary photographer who did not pick up a camera until her 40s when her daughter died. The first gathers stirring, often poetic images from the Mexican revolution by the likes of Manuel Ramos, Sabino Osuna and Armando Salmerón, including the latter's unforgettable portrait of a handsome and defiant Emiliano Zapata. The second pays homage to a woman who studied under the late, great Manuel Alvarez Bravo and then helped redefine Mexican portraiture, documentary and landscape photography in the 80s and 90s with her evocative black-and-white images. Her series taken in Frida Kahlo's bathroom, including one of the artist's bruised and swollen feet and another of her orthopaedic corset, are almost the antithesis of the artist's own depictions of suffering, in their starkness and understatement.
Across town, in the disused railway sheds that are yearly turned into vast exhibition stages, a Mexican master of a different kind is on show. As anyone who saw his show at the Photographers' Gallery in London in 2003 will know, Enrique Metinides's work is not for the faint-hearted. The title alone – 101 Tragedies – gives fair warning of the content, if not the form. Metinides is Mexico's Weegee, an ambulance chaser whose images are graphic in the extreme: close-ups of road accident victims, murder scenes, natural and man-made disasters. Often resembling film stills, Metinides's colour photographs also seem hyper-real in the manner of Gregory Crewdson's ornate created scenarios. They are, though, all too real, and utterly fascinating in their mix of humanity – the sad gaze of onlookers, the tender ministry of policemen and first-aid workers – and graphic voyeurism.
Sensationalism and humanity clash again in the contrasting worlds recorded by Daniela Rossell and Dulce Pinzón. Rossell's staged portraits of rich and famous Mexican society women in provocative poses caused a storm when first shown in Mexico eight years ago. They highlight not just the opulence of her subjects' lifestyles, but their even more extravagant fantasies, which are often baroque to the point of offensiveness – a Jacuzzi on a rooftop overlooking the sprawling city.
Pinzón, conversely, shows everyday Mexican people as superheroes, the twist being that Noe Reyes, the man on the bicycle dressed up as Superman, and Maria Luisa Romero, the woman in the laundromat dressed as Wonder Woman, are immigrant workers in New York who toil for long hours for low wages. Pinzón celebrates this invisible community in an obvious but touching way. She also records the punishing hours they work and the amount of money they send home weekly to their families; by doing so they help keep both the Mexican and American economies afloat.
Two masters of the art of cinema photography are also being celebrated in Arles: Gabriel Figueroa – who created so many stunning images for Luis Buñuel – and French veteran Chris Marker, whose stills film, La Jetée, is an abiding influence on experimentally minded photographers grappling with the seemingly endless possibilities of the digital age. The Figueroa exhibition is a series of giant projections on the walls of the beautiful Eglise des Frères Prêcheurs, a poetic reconfiguration of narrative and image of astonishing power and beauty.
Chris Marker's show brings together work from his global travels, including street portraits from Korea and images of daydreaming passengers on the New York subway alongside his own impressionistic text-poems.
Marker, unconsciously or otherwise, sensed the future uses of photography, and glimpses of his democratic vision and restless methodology are apparent in much of the new digital work on display this year. The most intriguing and baffling – and some might say, depressing – show is From Here On, a kind of manifesto for the future of photography curated by, among others, Joachim Schmid, a pioneering user of found photographs, and the ubiquitous Martin Parr. Here, appropriation and manipulation is all, but I left this big and often bewildering show feeling drained of energy and enthusiasm for a future so lacking in depth and so brimming with adolescent in-jokiness. A visual form of sampling holds sway, but to dramatically uneven ends. Great to see Monica Haller's brilliant war-reportage-memoir-with-a-difference series, Riley and his story, receiving the attention it deserves, though.
This year's Discovery Award nominations were less uneven, as the usual mix of the humane and the determinedly detached fought for one's flagging attention (the first week of the festival culminated in an award ceremony last night). I liked Mark Ruwedel's bleakly poetic desert landscapes at dusk (nominated by Tate Modern's Simon Baker) and Rut Blees Luxemburg's Black Sunrise series of dreamlike urban meditations. Jo Ratcliffe's black and white Angolan landscapes are a brilliant evocation of violence and forgetting, while David Horowitz turns photography into land art on his long walks across the Californian coastline. There is some much-needed humour in his work, too, and I like the way he uses small internet interventions to spread his mischievous ideas. (His photos of the Pacific Ocean coast – often with him in them – were uploaded on to the internet and were used as location images on Wikipedia. After much debate, they have since been removed or edited.)
Yann Gross is a roving photographer, too, though of a different kind. Using David Lynch's film The Straight Story as his model, he travelled the Rhone valley on a moped, carrying his tent and camera equipment in a small towed trailer. His series, Horizonville, records his interaction with the local community, many of whom seem intent on creating their own American heartland in rural Switzerland. This is an imagined elsewhere that Gross has helped create, too, in these in-between pictures of drag racers, Harley owners and truck slaloms.
On Thursday night, in the Roman amphitheatre, Vanessa Winship's beautifully understated reportage, for which she has just won the Cartier-Bresson prize, was celebrated in an all-too-short slide show, while Mitch Epstein acknowledged his Prix Pictet award in a projection that suited his epic American landscapes. Both artists, in their different ways, use photography to look long and deeply at the world around them. Their photography seems sure of itself. Elsewhere, though, the static and buzz of photography's uncertain future was the loudest, most distracting background noise in a curiously fragmented festival. We had better get used to it.
To read more of Sean O'Hagan on photography go to guardian.co.uk/ohaganphotography
guardian.co.uk
Enrique Metinides's photograph of the Regis Hotel, Centro Historico, Mexico City, after the earthquake of 19 September 1985. Photograph: Enrique Metinides
The subtitle of this year's Rencontres d'Arles – arguably Europe's most important photography festival – could easily have been "What Is Photography For?" It is a question being asked with some intensity and a degree of mischief on the internet via the likes of Google Images, Flickr and Photobucket, and by a host of artists for whom photography's vast archive of the strange, the beautiful and the mundane is an endless treasure trove to be reappropriated, manipulated and added to ad infinitum.
The fast and loose approach by a new generation of digital artists is one of the dominant themes of this year's Rencontres, alongside a historical trawl through Mexican photography from the revolution to the present day. It makes for a sometimes uneasy mix of the serious and the wilfully amateur. Visitors here are typically photography buffs from across Europe and the US, and seem younger and trendier this year. The work reflects the festival-goers: I often felt I was wandering through a global village of images, with the unevenness and lack of a guiding current, a metaphor for photography's ongoing identity crisis.
For all that, it is almost worth popping over to Arles just for Republic, the festival within the festival that is devoted to Mexican photography. The logical place to begin is the Espace van Gogh, where two extraordinary exhibitions sit side by side – Mexico: Photography and Revolution and a retrospective devoted to Graciela Iturbide, an extraordinary photographer who did not pick up a camera until her 40s when her daughter died. The first gathers stirring, often poetic images from the Mexican revolution by the likes of Manuel Ramos, Sabino Osuna and Armando Salmerón, including the latter's unforgettable portrait of a handsome and defiant Emiliano Zapata. The second pays homage to a woman who studied under the late, great Manuel Alvarez Bravo and then helped redefine Mexican portraiture, documentary and landscape photography in the 80s and 90s with her evocative black-and-white images. Her series taken in Frida Kahlo's bathroom, including one of the artist's bruised and swollen feet and another of her orthopaedic corset, are almost the antithesis of the artist's own depictions of suffering, in their starkness and understatement.
Across town, in the disused railway sheds that are yearly turned into vast exhibition stages, a Mexican master of a different kind is on show. As anyone who saw his show at the Photographers' Gallery in London in 2003 will know, Enrique Metinides's work is not for the faint-hearted. The title alone – 101 Tragedies – gives fair warning of the content, if not the form. Metinides is Mexico's Weegee, an ambulance chaser whose images are graphic in the extreme: close-ups of road accident victims, murder scenes, natural and man-made disasters. Often resembling film stills, Metinides's colour photographs also seem hyper-real in the manner of Gregory Crewdson's ornate created scenarios. They are, though, all too real, and utterly fascinating in their mix of humanity – the sad gaze of onlookers, the tender ministry of policemen and first-aid workers – and graphic voyeurism.
Sensationalism and humanity clash again in the contrasting worlds recorded by Daniela Rossell and Dulce Pinzón. Rossell's staged portraits of rich and famous Mexican society women in provocative poses caused a storm when first shown in Mexico eight years ago. They highlight not just the opulence of her subjects' lifestyles, but their even more extravagant fantasies, which are often baroque to the point of offensiveness – a Jacuzzi on a rooftop overlooking the sprawling city.
Pinzón, conversely, shows everyday Mexican people as superheroes, the twist being that Noe Reyes, the man on the bicycle dressed up as Superman, and Maria Luisa Romero, the woman in the laundromat dressed as Wonder Woman, are immigrant workers in New York who toil for long hours for low wages. Pinzón celebrates this invisible community in an obvious but touching way. She also records the punishing hours they work and the amount of money they send home weekly to their families; by doing so they help keep both the Mexican and American economies afloat.
Two masters of the art of cinema photography are also being celebrated in Arles: Gabriel Figueroa – who created so many stunning images for Luis Buñuel – and French veteran Chris Marker, whose stills film, La Jetée, is an abiding influence on experimentally minded photographers grappling with the seemingly endless possibilities of the digital age. The Figueroa exhibition is a series of giant projections on the walls of the beautiful Eglise des Frères Prêcheurs, a poetic reconfiguration of narrative and image of astonishing power and beauty.
Chris Marker's show brings together work from his global travels, including street portraits from Korea and images of daydreaming passengers on the New York subway alongside his own impressionistic text-poems.
Marker, unconsciously or otherwise, sensed the future uses of photography, and glimpses of his democratic vision and restless methodology are apparent in much of the new digital work on display this year. The most intriguing and baffling – and some might say, depressing – show is From Here On, a kind of manifesto for the future of photography curated by, among others, Joachim Schmid, a pioneering user of found photographs, and the ubiquitous Martin Parr. Here, appropriation and manipulation is all, but I left this big and often bewildering show feeling drained of energy and enthusiasm for a future so lacking in depth and so brimming with adolescent in-jokiness. A visual form of sampling holds sway, but to dramatically uneven ends. Great to see Monica Haller's brilliant war-reportage-memoir-with-a-difference series, Riley and his story, receiving the attention it deserves, though.
This year's Discovery Award nominations were less uneven, as the usual mix of the humane and the determinedly detached fought for one's flagging attention (the first week of the festival culminated in an award ceremony last night). I liked Mark Ruwedel's bleakly poetic desert landscapes at dusk (nominated by Tate Modern's Simon Baker) and Rut Blees Luxemburg's Black Sunrise series of dreamlike urban meditations. Jo Ratcliffe's black and white Angolan landscapes are a brilliant evocation of violence and forgetting, while David Horowitz turns photography into land art on his long walks across the Californian coastline. There is some much-needed humour in his work, too, and I like the way he uses small internet interventions to spread his mischievous ideas. (His photos of the Pacific Ocean coast – often with him in them – were uploaded on to the internet and were used as location images on Wikipedia. After much debate, they have since been removed or edited.)
Yann Gross is a roving photographer, too, though of a different kind. Using David Lynch's film The Straight Story as his model, he travelled the Rhone valley on a moped, carrying his tent and camera equipment in a small towed trailer. His series, Horizonville, records his interaction with the local community, many of whom seem intent on creating their own American heartland in rural Switzerland. This is an imagined elsewhere that Gross has helped create, too, in these in-between pictures of drag racers, Harley owners and truck slaloms.
On Thursday night, in the Roman amphitheatre, Vanessa Winship's beautifully understated reportage, for which she has just won the Cartier-Bresson prize, was celebrated in an all-too-short slide show, while Mitch Epstein acknowledged his Prix Pictet award in a projection that suited his epic American landscapes. Both artists, in their different ways, use photography to look long and deeply at the world around them. Their photography seems sure of itself. Elsewhere, though, the static and buzz of photography's uncertain future was the loudest, most distracting background noise in a curiously fragmented festival. We had better get used to it.
To read more of Sean O'Hagan on photography go to guardian.co.uk/ohaganphotography
guardian.co.uk
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