Good news: a number of great exhibits.
Less good news: 4 of the most amazing Arbus, Leiter, Wenders and Casa Susanna by the stinginess of their organizers only allow us to show a tiny handful of images.
Jean-Jacques Naudet
WIM WENDERS / POLAROID OF MY FRIENDS
Espace Van Gogh
At the end of 1976, I shot The American Friend in Hamburg and Paris, with Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper. The screenplay was adapted from the novel Ripley’s Game, by Patricia Highsmith. Polaroids were then the equivalent of the instant photos that smartphones allow today – their analog ancestors, in short. Real diaries, the cameras produced “original” impressions. I would photograph different filming locations, then I would pin the Polaroids to the wall of the production office. The person in charge of the script photographed each scene to ensure their continuity. I photographed my actors during rehearsals and sometimes during filming.
SAUL LEITER / ASSEMBLAGES
Palais de l’Archevêché
We often consider the photographs as important moments but they are in reality small fragments of an unfinished world, will say Saul Leiter. His own world is conceived in this way, like small fragments of images affixed, sewn together, which pile up and form vast and ever larger expanses. New York, paradigm of modernity, this city that beats time night and day will be for almost sixty years the place of his little aesthetic finds and optical inventions. Everything is a question of balance, accuracy and humility in the work of the man who nevertheless attached great importance to imperfection. The exhibition presented for the first time in Arles brings together a selection of photographs, drawings and paintings for the most part unpublished and invites us to discover a work where languages rub shoulders, respond to each other, converse and tell us the vision of the world of one of the most fascinating photographic artist of the 20th century.
DIANE ARBUS / CONSTELLATION
Parc des Ateliers – La Tour
On the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Diane Arbus, LUMA Arles presents Constellation, an exhibition revealing for the first time the entire work of this great photographer. In the form of an immersive installation, the exhibition will show her master set, consisting of more than 450 prints, some of which are still unseen. Constellation, part of the living archives program linked here with the collection of the LUMA / Maja Hoffmann Foundation, will offer visitors a labyrinthine stroll through the heart of the work of Diane Arbus, allowing you to freely discover or rediscover her images from a new angle.
CASA SUSANNA
Space Van Gogh
In 2004, two antique dealers discovered 340 photographs from the 1950s and 1960s on a New York flea market. The singularity of these images lies in the fact that the men who appear in them are disguised as women and that their feminine identity is that of the “respectable housewife”, the girl next door or the lady patroness. Gone are the feathers and the exaggerated make-up of the cabaret: here, just perfect hostesses in the intimacy of their interior. Behind these photographs hides, in reality, a vast clandestine network of transvestite men. They are married, good fathers of the American white middle class. They are engineers, airline pilots or civil servants in federal agencies. They embody the American dream. And its nightmare. Because the America of those years was also one of segregation, racial, sexual or political.
Arles 2023 – Les Rencontres de la Photographie
from July 3 to September 24, 2023
Opening week 3 – 9 July 2023
www.rencontres-arles.com
