Arles Diary, part 1

First dispatch from the Rencontres d'Arles: the heat and crush of too many images, photography as the way we now experience the world, and being floored by Ming Smith.

To say that there is something superficial about photography is almost trivial: It quite literally deals with surfaces and the reflecting light on them. To say, it erases context instead of creating it is equally obvious: The left, right, up, down off the slice of the world you are cutting out is abandoned and the connections to what's left in your frame are severed irreversibly.

And yet: Here I am in Arles, fluttering from image to image like a nervous honey bee lured by colors and shapes. Arles is an assault. It's too hot, it's too crowded, exhibitions are too crammed and there are way too many of them, there are too many dangling Leicas and seriously, is this the only art-form that is looked at almost exclusively by people who perform the art themselves? It's hard to think of a gallery with paintings, where every visitor brings a canvas and some brushes and breaks out spontaneously into painting at a moment's notice...

And so photography is not an art, it has become the first and foremost way to experience the world: Mediated by a lens, by a print or by a screen, it inevitably moved in between our eyes and the world.

In this sea of images, you look for some islands, something to hold on to: Celebrity is the most important currency in festivals like this: Have you already seen X, or is Y attending - the gossip is, what holds these kinds of festivals together. I've seen Ming Smith's "Wandering Light" in the Église Sainte-Anne, I took a very pleasant nap in the climatized rooms of the Chapelle Saint-Martin du Méjan. It was actually the first time I have seen prints by Alex Webb, I only knew his work from books and magazines. There are not a lot of surprises: I was floored by Ming Smith, I did not know her before and it only makes a lot of sense to give her images that much room to breathe. There is a quiet, unassuming portrait of James Baldwin that almost had me crying. There is a picture of the young Grace Jones that embodies her first name. There is a "Self Portrait as Josephine Baker", that collapses the complexities of navigating performing black identities into one frame. Pictures of a sunken era...

Harry Gruyaert's "A Sense of Place" sent me into sleep: He is certainly a good photographer, but a projection of all his images onto two cinema screens in the quiet, climatized Chapelle Saint-Martin du Méjan after a long hot day - that's a tough ask.

I will certainly come back to this: There is something on Edward Steichen and the large William Klein retrospective that is constantly overcrowded...

While photography from Africa is an important thread and projects come from all countries all over the world, the curatorial team is - as we have come to expect by now - predominantly white and western: The French education pipeline of the Sorbonne, EHESS, ENS Ulm / Sciences Po, École nationale supérieure de la photographie (ENSP) is still going strong, the two notable outliers are Nadine Hounkpatin from Benin, and Wang Xi from China. So now that we're already amidst the backlash and questions of Representation are already starting to disappear again together with critiques of its institutional manifestations, not a lot seems to have changed on the way...

There are discoveries here: Luis Carlos Tovar with "Jardin de mi Padre", a work on Chile in the 1980s, the conflict of FNARC and the impact of extraction of Metals like Aluminium, Halogen, Quicksilver on the health of people, heart-breaking stories, wonderful photography and a great book design: Still as current as ever, as nothing really seems to be changing and images don't seem to be doing much to help it...

stay tuned for DAY 2