2023-07-07 18:54:29
Les Rencontres d’Arles 2023dossierIn a visual landscape that is disrupted and more vibrant than ever, photographic creation, in all its wide range of styles, means and objectives, remains fully relevant.
On the occasion of the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles, which takes place from July 3 to September 24, 2023, Liberation gives pride of place to photography. Find this special issue “Libé des photographes” on newsstands on July 8 and 9 or on the reader.
What place is left for photographers? This is the legitimate question posed by the American Gregory Crewdson during the – lethargic, too bad – opening night of the 54th Rencontres d’Arles at the Théâtre Antique. In a world doped with images where everyone stores and shares thousands of snapshots with their smartphone, where the hypnotic power of social networks makes the printed image obsolete, where artificial intelligence vampirizes and electrifies creation: what can photographers do? “There is still room for psychological photographs and images that express timelessness,” reassured Gregory Crewdson feverishly, whose stagings produced as in the cinema, melancholy and fabricated mirrors of a disenchanted America, are exhibited in majesty. in general mechanics.
One could add that photographers still have the privileged space of exhibitions, particularly at the Rencontres d’Arles, where Fresson prints and AI-generated images rub shoulders in wise hangings. There, the public takes time out of the screens. Under the leadership of Christoph Wiesner and Aurélie de Lanlay, this edition is gaining momentum in a wide range of proposals: fascination with archives (photos of immigrants from North Africa at the Studio Rex in Marseille, transvestite men from “Casa Susanna”), reporting (50 years in the eye of Libé), highlighting Nordic women, post-Cindy Sherman generation (“Søsterskap”), gypsies from every angle (Jacques Léonard, “Lumières des Saintes “), the big names (Wim Wenders, Agnès Varda, Gregory Crewdson, Saul Leiter, Diane Arbus – we will come back to this), young talents from here (Marguerite Bornhauser) and from around the world (Bangladeshi Md Fazla Rabbi Fatik at Discovery Prize Louis Roederer Foundation). In this range calculated to please, some very nice surprises emerge (the Arlesian Nicole Gravier, the Brazilian Rosângela Rennó and the Polish Zofia Kulik). In today’s great visual barnum, photographers still have everything to do in these magnificent spaces for experimentation: Arles is still the festival where you can cover your body with rice cakes to transform yourself into a roll of spring (Hien Hoang) and hanging huge photo papers in the jungle to capture its vibrations (Roberto Huarcaya). Finally, there remains for artists the inexhaustible laboratory of reality, “reality is still a hundred times more exciting than Midjourney”, reported the adventurers of roadhouses Eric Tabuchi and Nelly Monnier, ready to set off again to unearth unusual architectures and stigmata in France. of a mutating civilization.
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