Tag: Les Rencontres d’Arles

Beyond Arles: Cosmos goes offspace

“The language of photography and books is evolving rapidly,” comments Sebastian Hau, as the major book fair he co-founded, Cosmos, separates from the main programme at Les Rencontres d’Arles to return offspace

29 March 2019

50 years of Arles: Les Rencontres d’Arles 2019 programme

50 years ago, photographer Lucien Clergue, writer Michel Tournier and historian Jean-Maurice Rouquette put together the first edition of Les Rencontres d’Arles in the city’s town hall. They had three exhibitions – a group show tracing the history of photography, and solo shows by Gjon Mili and Edward Weston. Now it’s the largest and most prestigious photography festival in the world, and this summer, they celebrate 50 years with 50 exhibitions, looking back on their history and heritage, as well as championing cutting-edge photography and emerging talent.

Running from 01 July till 22 September, the festival is lead by director Sam Stourdzé for the sixth year. Last year, Stourdzé was criticised by a group of eminent photography specialists in an open letter urging him to include more women in the main programme. A year on, it seems they’ve taken the criticism on board. Marina Gadonneix, Germaine Krull, Helen Levitt, Evangelia Kranioti, Libuse Jarcovjakova, Camille Fallet, and Pixy Liao, among many more, appear on the main programme with solo shows; the festival also includes a section titled Replay, which is dedicated to female-led narratives.

Replay includes a group show titled The Unretouched Woman, which combines the work of Eve Arnold, Abigail Heyman and Susan Meiselas, whose photobooks from the 1970s challenged gender bias and celebrated women from across the globe. In the same section is a group exhibition of around 200 vintage prints by Berenice Abbott, Florence Henry, Germaine Krull and more, as well as Tom Wood’s Mothers, Girls, Sisters, which was shot in the suburbs of Liverpool between the early 1970s and late 1990s.

14 March 2019

Frank Gehry’s LUMA Arles centre takes shape

Its opening has been pushed back to 2020, but the LUMA Arles complex is taking shape in the French town celebrated for its prestigious Les Rencontres d’Arles photography festival.

Set on the site of the former SNCF rail yard long used for exhibitions by Les Rencontres, LUMA Arles will be an interdisciplinary arts centre aimed at supporting and producing exhibitions, research, education and archives. It is backed by Swiss collector Maja Hoffmann, whose LUMA Foundation has been involved with Les Rencontres d’Arles since 2013. LUMA Arles will occupy a 20-acre site when it’s complete, and the arts centre will be the centre-piece.

26 November 2018

Photobooks of the year (so far)

Foam founder Marloes Krijnen, curator Yumi Goto, and photographers Rob Hornstra, Mark Power and Mariela Sancari highlight the photobook that have impressed them most so far in 2018 – including Senta Simond’s Rayon Vert, Christian van der Kooy’s Anastasiia, and John Myers’ The Portraits

2 August 2018

Fondation HCB moves to a larger new home in Le Marais, Paris

The Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson is moving to new premises in Paris, giving it double the exhibition space, a bigger research space, street-level access, and a place in the cultural hotspot of Le Marais, also home to the Maison Européenne de la photographie, The Pompidou Centre, the Museum Picasso, the Museum Carnavalet, and the forthcoming Pinault Foundation, to name just a few.

The Fondation HCB’s 800 square metre new home will open on 06 November, and will be further expanded “in a year or two” when a new extension will triple the hanging space from its current venue in Montparnasse, according to Fondation HCB director François Hebel. “Then we will enter more experimental shows,” he told BJP. “It is hard to say [more] as this is not today and linked to the creativity of the artists that we will enjoy showing then.”

26 July 2018

Arles: Wiktoria Wojciechowska’s Sparks from Ukraine

When Polish photographer Wiktoria Wojciechowska first heard about the ongoing Ukrainian conflict she was in China, shooting a project titled Short Flashes, which went on to win the 2015 Leica Oskar Barnack Newcomer Award. “I was cracking the internet but everything was so blocked I couldn’t get any information,” she says. “I was asking all my friends, then I realised not many people knew about it, even though it’s so close [as Ukraine borders Poland]. I was really inspired to go by fear, by wondering how I would react if the same thing happened in my country.”

9 July 2018