Les Rencontres d’Arles 2024

Beneath The Surface

Festival review by Mark Durden

For the 55th time, Arles, the historic Roman city in southern France, hosts the prestigious Les Rencontres d’Arles, where municipal buildings are transformed to showcase the visual legacies of photographers and artists worldwide. This year’s theme, Beneath the Surface, explores narratives that uncover divergent paths, often revealing vulnerabilities in seemingly impermeable facades. As expected, the festival boasts its usual grandeur, meticulous organisation, and impressive works by renowned artists. Yet, as Mark Durden writes, it is the traditional photographic approaches that retain a profound impact amidst the festival’s exploration of new directions in the medium.


Mark Durden | Festival review | 11 July 2024 | In association with MPB

Sophie Calle’s exhibition of some of her own artworks and possessions are left to rot in the subterranean Cryptoporticus in Arles, offering a great contrast to the clamouring image spectacle of the very festival of which it is part. On discovering one of her favourite works, The Blind, had become toxic through mould spores after her studio was damaged in a storm, and refusing to follow the restorer’s suggestion that it should be destroyed, Calle decided to exhibit it (together with other works that had been contaminated and objects from her life that she no longer had any use for but could not throw away) in a humid and underground place where its degradation could continue. Calle’s show, in this respect, offers a mini retrospective, a darkly comic counterpoint to the grandiosity of more spectacular displays above ground, and a reminder of the ultimate and inevitable mortality of art and the artist. When I viewed her exhibition, water was constantly dripping upon large framed black-and-white prints of graves, laid on the floor.

This year’s Les Rencontres d’Arles is marked by a schism between those who work against photography, those who deploy it through montage in installations and those who less ostentatiously explore its intrinsic properties. Calle works against photography, but knowingly and comedically, clearly relishing the correspondence between her decaying pictures and their sepulchral and funerary setting.

In the impressive interior of the 15th century century Gothic Église des Frères Prêcheurs, Spanish photographer Cristina de Middel’s flagship show’s magical realist response to the migration route across Mexico to the US, with its overblown and enigmatic combinations of pictorial elements, objects, archival material and Mexican lotería card imagery (this game of chance, presumably there to bring in an iconography related to Mexico and imply the journey of migrants is a lottery and up to fate) muddles the clarity of reportage and seemingly relishes the resultant ambiguity. The US’ brutal migrant policy and murderous exploitation by cartels through both people and drug trafficking (nothing to do with chance) becomes a cue to a fantastical tale, modelled on Jules Verne’s science fiction Journey to the Centre of the World (1864). The problem with such a spectacular display is that it is hard to engage and relate to what is going on as images collide and compete for attention. If montage was originally intended to be critically dialectical and produce new meaning, the danger here is that things become all too uncertain.

Mary Ellen Mark, who is given a significant and engaging retrospective at Espace Van Gogh, valorises an older, humanist documentary tradition; her 1987 portrait of the Damm family in the car in which they were living at the time, is in some ways her “Migrant Mother”. Perhaps it is not so obsolete as de Middel’s pop documentary display might suggest. The real goes beyond our imagination, and is always full of surprises. Photographers like Mark are attuned to this and bring it out again and again in many of their extraordinary pictures. In her powerful, colourful, somewhat voyeuristic depictions of sex workers in Mumbai, she may be outside but the sense is that she pictures more from the inside and in affinity with these women.                                                                                                                                                   At the Palais de L’Archevêché, I’m So Happy You Are Here, Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now curated by Lesley A. Martin, Takeuchi Mariko and Pauline Vermare, was a welcome change and far cry from the continued celebration of such male Japanese photographers as Daido Moriyama and their fixation on women as subject. But with so many photographers on show, 26, it only functions as a taster. I would have liked to have seen more work by Mari Katayama. Born with tibial hemimelia, which caused the bones in her lower legs and left hand to be undeveloped, and having decided to amputate her legs at the age of nine, the young artist sees herself as ‘one of the raw materials to use in my work’ in extraordinary self-portraits with hand-sewn prostheses.

Ishiuchi Miyako, recipient of the Women in Motion Award, as well as showing in I’m So Happy, is given a solo show at the Salle Henri-Comte, presenting photographs of objects and possessions remaining after death: her mother’s used lipstick, her lingerie, her hairbrush tangled with her hair, her dentures. There is also a picture of her mother’s scarred skin. For Miyako, ‘things touched by my mother were like part of her skin.’ The intimacy and poignancy of such photographs is continued in other pictures: the clothing and personal objects of Atomic bomb victims, from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, and Frida Kahlo’s belongings, her nail varnish, decorated corsets and casts, through which one can sense the presence and strength of the artist. Miyako is responsive to the intrinsic properties and resonances of photography as an auratic medium. In contrast to Calle’s funereal retrospective, for Miyako, objects from the past, through photography, are ‘revived in the present moment.’

In many ways, New Farmer (2024) by Bruce Eesly offers a bright, jaunty and comic interlude to the festival; an AI generated mock documentary, consisting of photographs and texts presented as if from the 1960s, parodying the Green Revolution’s goal of intensified agricultural yields, by showing farmers, fields and smiling kids replete with oversized vegetables. Such absurdity and fakery serves as a fictional counterpoint to the reality of what increasing farming yields has led to, as the artist says: ‘giant fields of monocultures, fertiliser run-off, pesticide pollution and a major loss of genetic plant diversity.’

The revelation of Nicolas Floc’h’s exhibition is that there is a rainbow of colours in water. His epic quasi-scientific project, Rivers Ocean. The Landscape of Mississippi’s Colors (2024), a dazzling array of different blocks of pure colour prints, the result of photographs taken underwater at different depths, presented together with black-and-white photographs of the land, nevertheless remained baffling. While the descriptive detail in some of the captioning texts might help explain what causes the colours – ‘In Minneapolis, the Mississippi gets its colour from the tanins of northern forests… At the surface, a bright luminous orange turns bright red at one to two meters in depth’ – in the end, I was left pondering the gulf between these beautiful and seductive colour fields and the pollution and ecological disaster they presumably are indexing.

At La Mécaniqué Générale, there is more colour, not so much in the photography, which is predominantly black-and-white, but on the walls that animate and resist the potential stasis of ordered clusters of photographs in Urs Stahel’s beautifully curated show, When Images Learn to Speak, drawn from the collection of Astrid Ullens de Schooten Whettnall. Since the collector has been buying up whole series rather than individual photographs, Stahel pursues the conceptual implications of serial groups of images, beginning with Harry Callahan’s street portraits and Walker Evans’ worker portraits. The show is very much about the formal richness, the subtleties and lasting fascination with what are mostly now classic photographs. There are also some nice surprises, including Max Regenberg’s billboards, for example, in both colour and black-and-white, taken over two decades, a simple register of fortuitous collisions and relations between the imagery of billboards and their settings: the crumpled rear end of a car appearing as if trampled by giant feet on the advertising beside it. Is there not a lesson for Arles here? Maybe we do not need the fireworks. Straight(-forward) photography can still be very engaging and lasting.  

Stahel’s curation links well with Lee Friedlander’s small survey show at LUMA. Friedlander was also in Stahel’s show and some of his TV pictures appear in both exhibitions. An outlier to the festival, the Friedlander exhibition nevertheless was a vital and refreshing addition. Selected and curated by filmmaker Joel Coen, the show underscores the enduring richness of his work and brilliant understanding of the possibilities of photographic form. Coen is skilled in picking out the compositional play of elements in well-known and lesser-known Friedlanders. The point made by Friedlander in the 1960s was that montage effects can already be found in the world; it is a question of framing. He is a picture-maker who made a virtue out of the limits of photography. A pity there are so few new contemporary photographers on show at Arles that come close.♦

Les Rencontres d’Arles 2024 runs until 29 September 2024.

 

 

 

 


Mark Durden is an academic, writer and artist. He is Professor of Photography and the Director of the European Centre for Documentary Research at the University of South Wales. He works collaboratively as part of the artist group Common Culture and, since 2017, with João Leal, has been photographing modernist architecture in Europe.

Images:

1-Sophie Calle, Finir en Beauté, 2024. Courtesy Anne Fourès

2-Cristina de Middel, An Obstacle in the Way [Una Piedra en el Camino], Journey to the center series, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Magnum Photos

3-Cristina de Middel, The One That Left [La que se Fue], Journey to the center series, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Magnum Photos

4-Cristina de Middel, The Black Door [La Puerta Negra], Journey to the center series, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Magnum Photos

5-Mary Ellen Mark, Rekha with beads in her mouth, Falkland Road, Mumbai, India, 1978. Courtesy of The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

6-Mary Ellen Mark, Vashira and Tashira Hargrove, Suffolk, New York, 1993. Courtesy of The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

7-Mary Ellen Mark, The Damm family in their car, Los Angeles, California, 1987. Courtesy of The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

8-Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled. From the eyes, the ears series, 2002-04. Courtesy the artist and Aperture Foundation

9-Sakiko Nomura, Untitled, 1997 from the Hiroki series. Courtesy the artist and Aperture Foundation

10-Hitomi Watanabe, Untitled from the Tōdai Zenkyōtō series, 1968-69. Courtesy the artist and Aperture Foundation.

11-Ishiuchi Miyako. Mother’s #35. Courtesy the artist and The Third Gallery Aya

12-Ishiuchi Miyako. ひろしま / hiroshima #37F donor: Harada A. Courtesy the artist and The Third Gallery Aya

13-Bruce Eesly, Peter Trimmel wins first prize for his UHY fennel at the Kooma Giants Show in Limburg, 1956. From the New Farmer series, 2023. Courtesy the artist

14-Bruce Eesly, Selected potato varieties are rated in sixteen categories according to the LURCH Desirable Traits Checklist, 1952. From the New Farmer series, 2023. Courtesy the artist

15-Bruce Eesly, Farm table in Dengen, 1955. From the New Farmer series, 2023. Courtesy the artist

16-Nicolas Floc’h, White River, Badlands, South Dakota, Rivers Ocean. From the Mississippi series, 2022. Courtesy the artist

17-Nicolas Floc’h, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Rivers Ocean. From the Mississippi series, 2022. Courtesy the artist

18-Nicolas Floc’h, Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana, Rivers Ocean. From the Mississippi series, 2022. Courtesy the artist

19-Nicolas Floc’h, Mississippi River, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Rivers Ocean. From the Mississippi series, 2022. Courtesy the artist

20-Moyra Davey, Subway Writers III, 2011. Courtesy the artist

21-Martha Rosler, Photo-Op, photomontage. From the House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home series, 2004. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin/Cologne/Munich

22-Judith Joy Ross, Annie Hasz, Easton, Pennsylvania, Protesting the Iraq War, Living With War. From the Portraits series, 2007. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne

23>24-Courtesy Lee Friedlander and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York.


1000 Words favourites

• Renée Mussai on exhibitions as sites of dialogue, critique, and activism.

• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age.

• Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect.

• Discover London’s top five photography galleries.

• Tim Clark in conversation with Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rugoff on Hiroshi Sugimoto.

• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous R. Dahmani.

Vivian Maier

Anthology

Exhibition review by Mark Durden

Vivian Maier, the reclusive photographer who made her living as a nanny, has become a fantasy figure for curators and photographers to imagine and shape as they want, argues Mark Durden in response to Anthology, the recent MK Gallery exhibition in Milton Keynes.


The story of Vivian Maier’s discovery and posthumous fame is fantastic. So much so that the trickster artist Joan Fontcuberta, in one of his recent public talks, mischievously said he had created her and asked an historian in Chicago to create the context for her work. He was joking of course.

The work of this reclusive photographer, who made her living as a nanny, came to light when the contents of a storage space she defaulted on was auctioned off in 2007, a couple of years before her death. She has subsequently become, as Fontcuberta suggests, a Mary Poppins figure whose Aladdin’s cave of photographic treasures feeds our desires and fantasies, which in the case of the exhibition Anthology, at the MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, seem to be centred upon the lost art of street photography.

The Chicago historian John Maloof was one of the buyers of Maier’s possessions and subsequently has been integral to the promotion and celebration of her photographic work – he now owns 90% of her output, over 140,000 images as well as 8mm film and audio recordings. It is from this collection this show is drawn – with over 140 photographs it makes quite a substantial exhibition, but at the same time represents a mere thousandth of the mass of photographs she left behind. With much of the exhibition given over to her black and white square format street pictures of New York and Chicago in the 1950s, she is being hyped as a new addition to an old school. Her black and white pictures are both new, in the sense they have not been seen before, and old in that they mark a past moment that we cannot really have again.

The show runs through the familiar array of street photography type subject matter – both observed and unobserved depictions of the carnival of different folk encountered in urban spaces. The picture of two elderly men crouched in contemplation over a coil of piping on a rainy sidewalk introduces the street photographer’s love of the surreal comedies of seemingly inexplicable witnessed events. The photograph of the still smoking remains of a burnt-out armchair on the sidewalk is of similar ilk, a beautiful mysterious incident. There is also the isolation of significant gestures and details, the tender touch of a couple holding hands, secretly observed from behind. The Rolleiflex camera held at waist height and into which she would look down into its viewfinder, was ideal for such surreptitious glimpses.

Maier can be astute in her picturing of the tensions and contradictions of conflict, as in the photograph entitled Armenian Woman Fighting (1956), which shows a stout older woman standing firm and defiant before a young police officer on the street in New York. The picture concentrates us on an intimacy despite their confrontation through the way his hands can be seen tightly gripping one of hers, as he tries to calm her. And there is a great image of disdain before wealth with a photograph of a woman, adorned and wrapped with two dead mink, the creature’s faces and claws all too visible and making a jarring contrast to her carefully refined self-image.  

Maier was not naïve. She was an avid film goer, both mainstream and avant-garde. A footnote in the recent Thames & Hudson monograph on Vivian Maier refers to how a house manager at a Chicago movie theatre said she even took an interest in Andy Warhol’s films. There is a certain Warholian aspect to her witty play with selfhood in her self-portraits, which are not revelatory but deadpan, blank and affectless. Perhaps one can also see her fascination for news stories and newspapers in relation to Warhol. Amongst the black-and-white street photographs, there is a remarkable and unusual close-up picture of the sides of two stacked newspapers – stuttering repetitions of photo images showing serious looking men in one stack, recurring Snoopy cartoon captions for laughter in the other: HA HA HA HA HA!. As one of her employers has recounted in Maloof’s documentary film about the photographer, Finding Vivian Maier (2013), she became an obsessive hoarder of copies of The New York Times, which she read daily and also photographed.

The opening wall text at the MK Gallery declares that this ‘self-taught artist’ now belongs to the canon of photographers alongside Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Helen Levitt and Garry Winogrand. This is all very well and good, but what really separates her work from those she is compared with, what makes it distinct? The self-portraits begin to signal a break from this street tradition as does her attention and fascination with newspapers, but the show does not make enough of her newspaper photographs and neither does it really emphasise enough the oddity of her self-portraits. The MK Gallery does however register the shift in her work as she started to use the Leica camera and colour film in the 1970s. Here one can find something different and less familiar. Her pictures and picturing are more layered and complex. In a photograph taken in an art museum, she plays upon the subtle interconnections between a smartly dressed woman and two girls and the painted portraits behind them. One child stands apart, rapt in attention, presumably captivated with the strange figure that Maier must have made as she took the picture. In an unusual self-portrait, her shadow and that of another figure is played off against and amongst different images on movie posters, with her shadow overlaying the image of an angel from the film Heaven Can Wait (1978), which is next to the image of an endangered female water skier on a Jaws 2 (1978) poster. And in a display of mirrors etched with the faces of stars, her hatted reflection appears over the face of Marilyn Monroe.

In a few colour photographs, the cropping and cutting of images provides her with a distinctive pictorial strategy. In the close-up of a newspaper, the rack’s Chicago Tribune sign cuts up the face of Nixon as we ponder the absurdity of his headline quote ‘Bombs saved lives’. In her picture of a suited African-American standing before her, she deliberately crops out his head, which draws attention to the way he is holding out a printed copy of The Last Messenger (1979), bearing a portrait of the face of the religious leader Elijah Mohammad.

With the last colour photograph included in the show, dated 1986, Maier has taken her ultimate self-portrait by photographing just her red hat and blue coat spread out on wooden decking. It seems a very knowing image. It beautifully suits what she has now become: a hollow figure to be taken up and reinvented again and again. Fontcuberta’s claim to have created her is then probably not that far from the truth. She is a fiction in that she has become a fantasy figure for curators and photographers to imagine and shape as they want. The problem with the MK Gallery show is a question of how Maier’s work has been filtered. By delimiting her work to more familiar and populist street photography modes, we are in danger of losing all that is weird, rich and complex among the extraordinary mass of images she has left us. ♦

All images courtesy Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York © Vivian Maier.

Vivian Maier: Anthology ran at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes from 11 June – 25 September 2022.

Mark Durden is a writer, artist and academic. Together with David Campbell and Ian Brown, he works as part of the art group Common Culture. Since 2017, Durden has worked collaboratively with João Leal in photographing modernist European architecture, beginning with Álvaro Siza. He is currently Professor of Photography and Director of the European Centre for Documentary Research at the University of South Wales, Cardiff.

Images:

1-Vivian Maier, Self-portrait, New York, 1953 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

2-Vivian Maier, 18 September, 1962 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

3- Vivian Maier, New York, 3 September, 1954 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

4-Vivian Maier, New York, 1954 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

5- Vivian Maier, New York, 1953 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

6- Vivian Maier, New York, 27 July, 1954 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

7-Vivian Maier, New York, 1954 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

8- Vivian Maier, New York, 2 December, 1954 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.