The 57th version of Les Rencontres de la Photographie feels unusually open-ended. In previous years, the competition has tended to anchor to unfastened but clearly articulated curatorial propositions. This summer season, director Christoph Wiesner as an alternative affords what he describes as “a space for complexity and attentiveness”. The programme resists “simplification, division and reduction”, he writes in his introductory essay for the competition’s catalogue, embracing images’s capability to disclose “what goes unnoticed, what endures, what circulates, what is passed on and what connects”.
That pondering is mirrored throughout greater than 40 exhibitions which can be organised into broad constellations—resembling ‘Independence’, ‘Forms of Life’ and ‘The Uncertain Archive’—slightly than a single overarching theme. At occasions the competition feels diffuse, with exhibitions starting from posthumous retrospectives and historic surveys (William Klein: This Way to Heaven, Animal Model: 200 Years of Photography) to process-driven abstraction and up to date set up (Meghann Riepenhoff’s cyanotypes created in nature, Lara Tabet’s microbiological altarpieces).
Yet the absence of a inflexible framework challenges guests to search out their very own connections in a welcome different to the sledgehammer method. And operating quietly by most of the strongest exhibitions is a priority not merely with images as image-making, however with images as a means of establishing historical past, reminiscence and id. Nowhere is that extra evident than in Ghana! Dreaming Independence 1957-1976 (till 4 October). One of the mental anchors of this 12 months’s programme, it’s put in on the primary ground of the Palais de l’Archevêché on one facet of the Place de la République, reverse a fourth-century Roman obelisk and the ornate Twelfth-century façade of the Église Saint-Trophime. Rather than retelling the acquainted political historical past of the West African state’s independence from Britain in 1957, curator Damarice Amao examines the visible tradition by which the newly impartial nation imagined itself and its future.
Photography seems not merely as documentation however as a constructing block in direction of statehood. Reproduced throughout books, magazines, stamps, textiles, postcards and official publications, photographs turned central to the development of a contemporary nationwide id. Photographers together with James Barnor, Felicia Abban, Willis E. Bell and Paul Strand are introduced into dialogue with up to date Ghanaian artists resembling Carlos Idun-Tawiah and Rita Mawuena Benissan, whose works query how that visible inheritance continues to form concepts of nationhood right now. It is an exhibition that demonstrates how decolonisation was as a lot an act of idealistic illustration as one in all politics, and the way images stay lively contributors in that course of slightly than passive historic data.
Stan Douglas’s Vancouver, 15 June 2011, from the collection 2011 ≠ 1848, 2021
© Stan Douglas. Courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner
If Ghana! seems on the making of nationwide historical past, Stan Douglas’s Bodies Never Lie, offered at Luma Arles (till 10 January 2027), examines how historical past itself is constructed. Douglas has lengthy occupied a particular place between images, cinema, theatre and set up, producing meticulously staged works that reconstruct ignored or unresolved historic moments to look at concepts of energy, resistance and the formation of collective reminiscence. The exhibition contains each the video works for which he’s finest recognized and nonetheless photographs, together with the mural-sized Vancouver, 15 June 2011, which re-enacts the Stanley Cup riot (also referred to as ‘the smartphone riot’, after a reported million photographs had been despatched to police investigators, captured on cell phones) in his hometown. Music as a robust social power stays an everlasting topic, and the centrepiece of Bodies Never Lie is a brand new movie commissioned by Luma. On one stage, Exquisite Corpse (2026) is an absorbing homage to flamenco as an artform, nicely price 25 minutes of your consideration, its split-screen viewpoint emphasising the gamers’ depth and gesture. On one other, set within the Fifties throughout General Franco’s rule, it explores flamenco as a coded type of resilience and resistance.
Installed at monumental scale at La Mécanique Générale, one of many ginormous former railway workshops that make up the revitalised Parc des Ateliers, the exhibition demonstrates the precision with which Douglas choreographs motion, structure and light-weight, creating photographs that possess each a documentary impulse and cinematic spectacle. It is among the many competition’s most bold up to date shows, not merely due to its scale however as a result of it exemplifies images’s increasing relationship with transferring picture and set up. In doing so, it additionally embodies Wiesner’s perception that images continues to generate new methods of seeing slightly than merely recording the world.
The most sudden exhibition comes on the Musée Réattu, the place domestically born designer Christian Lacroix repeats his 2008 function as visitor curator, albeit on a smaller scale. Photography Collector (till 4 October) is much less an exhibition about vogue (although there are many his magical drawings on the higher flooring) than concerning the associative pleasures of trying. Lacroix’s picks transfer freely between celebrated photographers, nameless vernacular footage and sudden visible juxtapositions, following intuition slightly than standard artwork historical past.
Depthless, life-size photographs by Katerina Jebb, made utilizing a handheld scanner, stand out, showing like ghostly apparitions of the museum’s archive, mingling with the works of Arles’s most well-known painter, Jacques Réattu, who purchased the constructing in 1796. Old and new collide in fantastic, shocking constellations, amongst them a Sarah Moon {photograph} hanging alongside vintage collectible figurines and drawings representing L’Arlésienne (The lady from Arles). The result’s an exhibition constructed on curiosity and visible reminiscence, suggesting that collections are autobiographies assembled by photographs.
It can also be fittingly housed within the museum that established France’s first images division in 1965 beneath the steerage of photographer Lucien Clergue and historian Jean-Maurice Rouquette—a transfer that helped lay the foundations for what would turn out to be the Rencontres 5 years later. That quiet historic echo provides the exhibition an added resonance. After a competition largely involved with rewriting histories and recovering ignored narratives, Lacroix reminds us that images additionally survives by the personal passions of those that protect, gather and join photographs throughout generations.