{"id":427093,"date":"2025-09-15T20:10:15","date_gmt":"2025-09-15T20:10:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/427093\/"},"modified":"2025-09-15T20:10:15","modified_gmt":"2025-09-15T20:10:15","slug":"france-flips-the-history-of-photography-upside-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/427093\/","title":{"rendered":"France Flips the History of Photography Upside Down\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

ARLES, France \u2014 The investigation of the archive, in all its malleable reinvention and disruption of canonical narratives, is at the core of this year\u2019s Rencontres d\u2019Arles<\/a> photography festival and its theme: \u201cDisobedient Images.\u201d<\/p>\n

The more than 40 exhibitions included in the 56th edition of the Rencontres, which translates to \u201cencounters,\u201d <\/strong>also lay the ground for an even larger event that France has in stock: the Bicentennial of Photography<\/a>, slated for 2026\u201327 to mark the date of the first image obtained through light, Joseph Nic\u00e9phore Ni\u00e8pce\u2019s iconic \u201cView from the Window at Le Gras<\/a>.\u201d What might at first seem a nationalist enterprise, or even a utopian recuperation of images on the cusp of disappearing, is, in fact, a vivacious call to rethink photography as a medium in constant renewal.<\/p>\n

This notion \u2014 that photographs influence historical revisionism \u2014 brings the festival into conversation with a cultural mission initiated in the years after World War II, when many other cultural festivals were launched in Europe. The Cannes Film Festival, the Avignon Theatre Festival, and the Antibes Jazz Festival all started between 1946 and 1960. Like other media, photography found its place in the historic arenas, the churches and cloisters, only to assert a new and revolutionary message.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\t\tIn praise of Anonymous Photography: Marion and Philippe Jacquier Collection at the Cloister of Saint-Trophime<\/p>\n

Rencontres d\u2019Arles continues to invite artists and curators to measure themselves up with spaces that are evocative of the long tail of history and how we record it, including the Cloister of St. Trophime<\/a>. Within those storied walls echo powerful connections. Take artist and activist Nan Goldin, whose \u201cStendhal Syndrome<\/a>\u201d (2024) finds resonance inside the ancient Church of St. Blaise<\/a> and asserts the power of seduction and autobiography in a world that is increasingly dark and obtuse. On July 8, she projected the digital slideshow \u201cMemory Lost<\/a>\u201d (2019\u201320) in the Roman Theatre. Author \u00c9douard Louis read a text beside Goldin in the ancient outdoor space, making the stones screech and shiver with his declaration: \u201cWe think that photography shows destruction of this world and things will change, but we are wrong, what worked in the past is no longer working today.\u201d In projection and in life<\/a>, Goldin moves the conversation, questioning the realism and effectiveness of photography while seeking answers about its political power today.<\/p>\n

The festival\u2019s exhibitions on Indigenous Australian artists and Brazilian photo archives provokingly raise these points. On Country: Photography from Australia<\/a> at the Church of St. Anne presents a collective excavation into the meaning of \u201ccountry\u201d beyond its geographical borders, an intimate dimension that brings together the material quality of photography with ritual sounds and evocative sculptural installations. Hanging from the church\u2019s Gothic vault are large fabrics of cyanotypes where Ngugi\/Quandamooka artist Sonja Carmichael has printed the traces of various elements used by local communities, from remnants of meals to natural objects like shells. Brenda Croft\u2019s large prints of Barangaroo First Nation women are obtained from tintypes, a 19th-century photographic process whose haunting identity emerges anew here. A soundscape broadcast across the exhibition features an intergenerational First Nations choir made up of Menero-Ngarigo and Dhurga-Yuin singers, who traveled across the world to perform during the festival\u2019s opening week in July.<\/p>\n

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\t\tOn Country: Photography from Australia in the Church of St. Anne, featuring a hanging work by Sonja Carmichael (Ngugi\/Quandamooka) and Elisa Jane Carmichael (Ngugi\/Quandamooka)<\/p>\n

A similar effort to draw new work from buried narratives and traditional crafts characterizes Thyago Nogueira\u2019s ambitious exhibition, Ancestral Futures: Brazilian Contemporary Scene<\/a>, where a wide range of strategies \u2014 from photomontage to AI, photo-roman, performance, and video \u2014 engage with the repatriation of Indigenous history. The packed installation inside the 17th-century architecture of the chapel of Trinitaires further enhances the decolonizing spirit of the project.<\/p>\n

The festival encourages surprise, puzzlement, and disorientation most effectively when it proves that the photographic archive expands when its images are not codified or canonized. The vernacular images from the collection of Marion and Philippe Jacquier in In Praise of Anonymous Photography<\/a>, for example, are \u201cdisobedient\u201d precisely because they drift away from anything that has already been seen and generate narratives that intrigued and even troubled me. There is sheer mystery in the show\u2019s display of anonymous autochromes<\/a>, an early-20th-century color photography process. I was drawn to the enigma of a personal photo album, in which a lover marked the sites of amorous encounter and wrote about urban margins, corners, windows, and metro stops in Paris (a literary landscape that seems surrealist but is just plain autobiographical).<\/p>\n

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\t\tYves Saint Laurent and Photography at M\u00e9canique G\u00e9n\u00e9rale<\/p>\n

In another kind of puzzle, Carine Kreck\u00e9, winner of the Luxembourg Photography Award, invites us to magnify the digital map of Google Earth in Losing North<\/a>. Presented in a series of digital screens inside the chapel of Charit\u00e9, the project explores the violence of the Assad regime in Syria through a digital blur of images depicting the destruction of the town of Arbin, north of Damascus, alongside the artist\u2019s narration of a personal detective search that has lost tangible bearings. This project of investigative journalism stumbles into a digital network where the visible appears and disappears, where the real is abstract, and the artist can neither grasp nor contain the immensity of war.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The images in Losing North hit close to home, to the daily experience of our screens, the obliteration caused by conflict and violence, the global Google Map that sees everything and then deletes what it sees. \u201cHow to view war today?\u201d asks Kreck\u00e9 in a recording, and recurs to the theories of French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman for answers. \u201cIf it is too far, you lose sight,\u201d she quotes, \u201cif it is too close, you lose vision.\u201d <\/p>\n

The abstraction of war addresses the key challenge raised by most projects in this festival: how to unpack and reshape what has become unclear, uncertain, and seemingly irrelevant. Ni\u00e8pce\u2019s image, captured back in 1826 at Le Gras, now faded and almost invisible, might yet offer a new ground for these interrogations.<\/p>\n

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\t\tAncestral Futures: Brazilian Contemporary Scenes at the Church of Trinitaires<\/p>\n

Les Rencontres d\u2019Arles: Disobedient Images<\/a> continues at various locations in Arles, France, through October 5. The festival was directed by Christoph Wiesner and Aur\u00e9lie de Lanlay.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ARLES, France \u2014 The investigation of the archive, in all its malleable reinvention and disruption of canonical narratives,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":427094,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5309],"tags":[2000,299,36,2249],"class_list":{"0":"post-427093","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-france","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-france","11":"tag-photography"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115210133538538926","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=427093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427093\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/427094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=427093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=427093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=427093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}