EMMA SARPANIEMI
Self-portrait as Cindy, 2022.
Two Ways to Carry a Cauliflower series.
Courtesy of the artist.
Søsterskap–Contemporary Nordic Photography exhibition.

Text: Simran Tuteja

It was fifty-four years ago when photographer Lucien Clergue, the writer Michel Tournier and the historian Jean-Maurice Rouquette chose Arles, France, the country where photography was invented, as the location for Les Rencontres d’Arles, an annual summer photography festival. The city offers a historical heritage of the region and is renowned for historical and contemporary photography art. Screens have taken precedence over the world; photography is growing and thriving. Rencontres d’Arles is a celebration of photography as an art and human progression. Photography animates and reflects society. This year, the festival will open July 3rd and run through September 24th.

ATTRIBUTED TO ANDREA SUSAN
Photo Shoot with Lili, Wilma, and friends, Casa Susanna,
Hunter, New York, 1964–1967.
Collection Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015.
Photo ˝ AGO.
Casa Susanna exhibition. 38

The 2023 themes for the festival include From Films to Stills, Representations, Revisiting, Mapping the Eye, Reminiscence(s), and Emergences featuring Gregory Crewdson, Agnès Varda, Riti Sengupta, Nicole Gravier, Zofia Kulik, Juliette Agnel, and Wim Wenders to name some. There are thirty exhibitions on the program as well as fifteen offered by Arles Associé and eleven by the Grand Arles Express. The festival is a platform for renowned and emerging photographers to showcase their art and encourage global social awareness. It acts as a laboratory to invent aesthetics and techniques. Rencontres d’Arles effortlessly captures the state of consciousness and the world's conscience. The photographers, curators, and artists join hands to see the transformation and growth of society. The program also includes The Rencontres d’Arles Book Awards, created to support photography books publication to reach a vast audience, and the Luma Rencontres Dummy Book Award to appreciate experimental and innovative publication forms of dummy books. The winners for both are announced during opening week.

PAUL STRAND
Young boy, Gondeville, Charente, France, 1951.
Courtesy Florence and Damien Bachelot Collection.
Portraits. The Florence and Damien Bachelot Collection at
the Musée Réattu exhibition.

Eric Tabuchi and Nelly Monnier will present Grey Sun, a derivative of their long-term project Atlas des Régions Naturelles, this year. The artists worked on attaining a transversal reading of Grey Sun in an attempt to sum up the world. They chose various construction sites across France as their subjects to reveal the transformation of landscape and architecture in the rise of global warming. Over three hundred forty prints and Polaroid photographs from the 1950s and 1960s were discovered in 2004 at a New York flea market that showed men dressed as housewives. There is no extravagant use of feathers or make-up, men are seen depicting their femininity by dressing up as ‘respectable’ housewives. These photographs are imperative to the LGBTQIA+ community. Curated by Isabelle Bonnet and Sophie Hackett, Casa Susanna shows the audience the photographs of the first transgender network in American LGBTQIA+ history.

HAROLD FEINSTEIN
Viva Puerto Rico, 1978.
Courtesy of the Harold Feinstein Photography Trust.
Wonder Wheel: Harold Feinstein exhibition.

Born in 1923 and died in 1971, Diane Arbus is one of the most acclaimed photographers of all time who photographed a wide range of subjects including children, mothers, couples, strippers, nudist, etc. In the centenary of her birth, LUMA Arles will be presenting an exhibition called Constellation comprising over four hundred and fifty photographs including unpublished ones. LUMA Foundation / Maja Hoffmann Collection will provide the audience with an insight into Diane Arbus’s work hence providing the audience with a new perspective. These are some of the collections and archival photographs that will be exhibited at the festival this year.

Minister of Culture of France, Rima Abdul Malak, acknowledges that photographers see what quotidian humans cannot. Photography is silent, unraveling the mystery of what we skim through and ignore. Every year at Rencontres d’Arles, the discoveries never seem to disappoint. It is an eclectic experience that will host over one hundred and twenty seven thousand visitors within three months in 2022. The artists this year will manage to evoke emotions, both silently and loudly, through their creativity, inventiveness, and uniqueness in the streets, cafes, and monuments of Arles, commented Patrick de Carolls, the President of the Agglomération, Arles Crau Camargue Montagnette. Starting July 3rd in Arles, Rencontres d’Arles will be hosting photography enthusiasts, artists and admirers from all around the world while providing various photographers the opportunity to showcase their experiments, innovations and arts.