It all began in 1970, when photographer Lucien Clergue (1934-2014), curator Jean-Maurice Rouquette (1931-2019) and writer Michel Tournier (1924-2016) campaigned for the recognition of photography and decided to create a festival in Arles, in the South of France, to make their voices heard. Over more than five decades, the festival has grown from a small group of passionate photographers to a global photography saga. The festival has become an integral part of this famous Camargue and Provencal town, renowned for its Roman heritage and its ferias, with the Rhône River running alongside.
For 55 years, every year between 1970 and 2024 (except in 2020, when a compulsory break was imposed by COVID-19), Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles has had several directors at the helm of the festival, and hundreds of photographers and artists have been invited, almost as many curators to organise almost 1,500 exhibitions in dozens of historic venues within the city itself or in unlikely satellite locations, talks, debates and conflicts, photo prizes, workshops and master classes with renowned photographers, portfolio readings, book selections, auctions, postersthat have become legendary, endless professional and friendly get-togethers, a multitude of screenings, legendary evenings in the ancient theatre, a plethora of discoveries and surprises, concerts and performances, DJ sets and late-night parties, all supported by major historical partners and patrons (Olympus, BMW, SNCF, Kering, the Luma Foundation) and above all by hundreds of thousands of visitors from all over the world who bring in economic spin-offs worth tens of millions of euros.
From the most famous photographers, both French and foreign (Ansel Adams, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Don McCullin, Gisèle Freund, André Kertész, Josef Koudelka, Sergio Larrain… The Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles has accompanied many careers and opened up its programme to other continents, other cultures and other photographic concerns. Indeed, what photographer hasn’t dreamed of one day being exhibited in Arles? What curator hasn’t hoped to organise an exhibition there? Because in a photographer’s or curator’s career, there is a before and an after to Arles.
So every year, for three months, between the first week of July (which is the inauguration week and therefore the world meeting place for professionals and enthusiasts) and the rest of the summer until the end of September, the city of Arles is in full swing. For half a century now, this has been the world’s leading photography festival, becoming an indisputable cultural event that has given rise to so many other festivals elsewhere in France and abroad.
But if Arles boasts the title of world capital of photography every year, it’s also thanks to the efforts of the gallery owners, artists, professionals and amateurs who take over the town in no fewer than a hundred exhibition venues as part of the festival’s ‘Off’ programme. Restaurants with attractive terraces and pretty boutiques are also getting in on the act. The facades of houses and the walls of the city are in turn covered with photographs printed like posters and stuck on like JR in a wild and aesthetic way, helping to transform the city into a giant photography gallery.
The Rencontres have also attracted other institutions such as the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photo and the Fondation Luma, created in 2004 by Maja Hoffmann, which supports contemporary creation. It has restored the huge area of the former SNCF workshops, with its silver-faceted tower built by the famous architect Frank Gehry right in the middle, which has become an emblem and can be seen from very far away. “Few towns of 50,000 inhabitants have so many cultural facilities: the publisher Actes Sud, the Van Gogh Foundation, the Archaeological Museum, the Lee Ufan Foundation, the School of Photography, the Luma Foundation”, observed former director Stam Stourdzé several years ago.
To mark its fiftieth anniversary, Stourdzé and Françoise Denoyelle have organised an exhibition entitled Toute une histoire, Arles a 50 ans, la collection des Rencontres. An unprecedented work of identification, classification and inventory has been carried out to transform the archive into memory and create the Rencontres collection that can be consulted by everyone. This collection allows us to delve with pleasure and nostalgia into a rich heritage, and to rediscover the history of the men and women of photography, telling the story of the emergence of new generations, new ways of looking at things, new practices, new relationships to the production of images from the 1980s and 2000s right up to the present day, when film gave way to digital before the era of the smartphone took hold. In 2024, the Rencontres d’Arles Collection will include almost 3,500 photographic works donated by over 470 photographers since 1976.
“Stirrings, spirits, traces, parallel readings and rereadings are all new perspectives underlying the 2024 edition of Les Rencontres d’Arles”, writes Christopher Wiesner, the director of Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles since 2020, in his introduction to the theme entitled Beneath the Surface for this 55th edition. Here is a selection of the exhibitions not to be missed this year: Mary Ellen Mark with Rencontres, Cristina de Middel with Voyages au centre, Nicolas Floc’h with Fleuves océan, le paysage de la couleur Mississipi, Uraguchi Kusugazu with Ama, Sophie Calle with Finir en beauté, Au nom du nom – les surfaces sensibles du Graffiti, Quelle joie de vous voir – photographes japonaises des années 50 à nos jours and Jean-Claude Gautrand with Libres expressions.
In short, every summer in Arles, we live, we breathe, we think, we dream, we wander, we admire, we exchange, we meet – all through photography!
Text by Christine Cibert
