Encounters with Photography / Les Rencontres de la photographie (Arles)

Gregory Crewdson. "Starkfield Lane, An Eclipse of Moths" series, digital pigment print, 2018-2019. Courtesy of the artist.

Les Rencontres de la photographie

Arles

Through September 24

By DAWN-MICHELLE BAUDE, August 2023

        Europe’s “largest” photo festival—Les Rencontres de la photographie—has again opened its mighty doors in medieval Arles. Now in the 24^th edition, Arles not only features photography, but stars in its own show. Twelfth-century stone cloisters, an undulating 19^th-century garden, Roman ruins, and LEED Platinum galleries deploying state-of-the-art curatorial resources: the settings boost even the least-convincing shows. Out of 27 official exhibition sites and the 9000 or so photos on display, Saul Leiter and Gregory Crewdson—among many Americans on offer—deliver the command performances.

Leiter (1923-2013) was pioneering color with expired Kodachrome 35 as early as 1948—his small-format street photographs from that era exhibit a painter’s concern for composition, the color blocks flirting with abstraction but never losing their New York ID. The city is omnipresent in crazy signage, surreal shop windows, gritty doorways, and people caught in the liquid amber of a vintage timewarp. Leiter’s Palais de l'archevêché exhibition pairs his mid-century photos with his abstract-expressionist paintings, a move that highlights compositional technique. The small-format canvases, however, pale in comparison with the luminous serendipity of the crystalized moment—when, say, Leiter captures girly legs swishing through the crosswalk, the tap-tap of their heels still resonating on the tarmac. John Berger’s notion of photos as “cardiograms” comes to mind, lives pulsing in their frames.

Forty-years Leiter’s junior, Gregory Crewdson’s mostly large-format LUMA show brings together the artist’s famous bodies of work, such as “Cathedral of the Pines” and “Eveningside.” Known for elaborately staged images requiring a studied production squad, Crewdson delivers suspenseful works so densely packed with potential stories that the photos are neutron stars of narrative, their intense gravity irresistibly pulling the viewer in. Is the pensive white woman seated on the bed, her nightgown strap slipped from her shoulder, dreading what already happened or what’s about to happen? Death? Opioids? PayDay Loans? The luscious, almost luxurious intensity of the image contrasts with the lower-middle-class mise-en-scène—pink floral lamp, Walmart mirror, framed landscape prints, lotion bottle. While Crewdson’s meticulous images convincingly dramatize fictional moments, their edgy beauty slips away from life and hovers near the Uncanny Valley, where the real and unreal uncomfortably vie for neural control. Empathy yeilds to prurience as these rust-belt vignettes disturb and intrigue by turns.

More American buzz at Arles goes to Casa Susanna at Espace Van Gogh, a fascinating documentary exhibit based on a trove of some 300 photos featuring a highly refined, and courageous, network of crossdressers from the 1950s and ’60s, whose alt-personalities are the June Cleaver and Doris Day housewives of a dangerously repressive U.S. era. Crossdressers also feature in the immersive Diane Arbus show at LUMA, where more than 450 prints, some unpublished, are suspended on metal bars in an open-plan gallery and complemented by mirrored surfaces. Rather than diminishing focus on the photographs, the mirrors displace the viewer into the show. What Susan Sontag construed as Arbus’ aggressive voyeurism morphs into participation, the viewer’s image numbering among the outsider portraits, such as Coney Island circus performers, for which Arbus is known.

Polaroids by Wim Wenders, stills by Agnès Varda—the Arles photo festival is not short on interest. French artist Nicole Gravier’s retrospective at the Ecole Supérieure de la Photographie is a powerhouse of wry Feminism, while Peruvian Roberto Huarcaya’s phantom portraits of the vanishing Amazonian rainforest is one among several shows foregrounding Earth. Conceptual, documentary, cinemagraphic—the festival’s wins far outweigh its misses. Ahlam Shibli’s photos of Palestinian dissonance nixxed my very determined mission to keep moving, to look at everything. I had no choice but to stop and consider a young boy’s balletic stride on an al-Khalil backstreet while an IUD exploded in imagination. Rather than satiating desire, Les Rencontres de la photographie keeps me going back for more. WM

Saul Leiter, "Barbara and J" (Undated). Courtesy of the Saul Leiter Foundation.

"Photo Shoot" from "Casa Susanna" 1964-1969. Courtesy Art Gallery of Ontario.