Linking Arles to aesthetics seems to be obvious. Certainly, Arles is beautiful. It’s a rule or constant in the South, cities are kissed by the sun. Arles is that much greater. The rays caress its pink walls, its alleyways emitting sweet scents. To wander around or live there is an aesthetic experience. Photography understand the attractiveness, and arrives there every summer in hopes of shining. For one day, The Eye of Photography is offering an overview of exhibitions where aesthetics play a primary role.
However, reader, we must forget that aesthetics in photography feed an endless debate. This article will not add more fuel to the fire. Let us sum up the simplest thing; this guide is offering a way to discover artists, putting the photo at the forefront. The message, political or social engagement of the author, even the general idea, is taking a backseat.
If one foggy morning (because Arles is also a party), you want to get out of bed, Joel Meyerowitz’s exhibition Early Works can be found. The Salle Henri-Comte is welcoming this great apostle of color from the 1970s. His strolls down the streets of New York and Paris are a delight. His first works play with silhouettes, shadows, and show an amusing detachment from his environment, knowing how to capture micro-events in the saturated streets.
Meyerowitz has long been roaming to photograph the streets, city outskirts, and deserted American motels. The visual experience offered by Christophe Rihet finds a certain correspondence with his American colleague. The intention, however, is much more serious. His series Road to Death, exhibited at the Maison des Peintres, fixes in one’s memory anonymous places, unfrequented routes, where, in the past, death occurred. Road accidents and their silent drama are implicitly evoked in these desert landscapes. The image is striking, the message solemn.
Getting back to the exhibition trail on foot seems to be a wise idea. Time for lunch, strength returned, mind eased, you bounce back to the spanish slopes. It’s the exhibition by the collective Blank Paper, the eponymous name of the Madrid school. It gathers the work of eleven photographers and shows their different adventures, gestures, and practices. Aesthetic research occupies a good many of them, just like Miren Pastor, Ricardo Cases, or Federico Clavarino.
Finally, the coolness in the Église des Trinitaires will not be too much to end the day. Marie Bovo is exhibiting (СТАНСЫ/ STANCES) there. The Spanish photographer traveled in different long-distance trains in Russia and Eastern Europe. With her large format camera, she systematically and randomly captured the landscapes she came across. She captured a piece of Europe suspended between two moments, of another temporality, as if frozen.
Arthur Dayras
Arthur Dayras is an author specialized in photography and lives and works in Paris.
Festival des Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles 2017
From July 3 through September 24, 2017
Arles, France
