Arles capitale della fotografia fino al 18 settembre 2011. La cittadina francese ospita infatti il più rinomato festival dedicato alla ottava arte in Europa. Sono circa sessanta le mostre dislocate nei posti più suggestivi e sconosciuti ai turisti, spesso chiusi al pubblico. La XLII edizione di Les Rencontres d’Arles Festival è il punto di incontro per collezionisti, curatori, galleristi, artisti, editori e amanti della fotografia, la scorsa edizione si stima siano passati da Arles circa 73.000 persone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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LE MOSTRE

 

MANIFESTOS

CHRIS MARKER
Born in 1921 in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Lives and works in Paris.
Chris Marker is one of the most influential and important filmmakers to emerge in the post-war era, where he often worked collaboratively with, amongst others, Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard. Marker appeared on the Paris cultural landscape as a writer and editor, winning admiration for the Petite Planète travel books he edited for Seuil beginning in 1954. Parallel to his written commentary, Marker also became identified for his uniquely expressive non-fiction films, eschewing traditional narrative technique and working from a deeply political vein. Marker began garnering international recognition in 1963 with the science-fiction short film La Jetée, a hugely influential story of nuclear experimentation and time travel. In the seventies Marker worked increasingly by himself creating documentaries both on the history of the left (Le Fond de l’air est rouge, 1977) and meditations on travel and memory (Sans Soleil, 1982). From 1952 to 2004, Marker has realised over forty films.
Chris Marker’s retrospective in Arles presents more than 300 works, produced between 1957 and 2010.
Coréennes is a project made in 1957 when Chris Marker was one of the few journalists who could still explore North Korea freely. The resulting photographs give an uncensored record of daily life, four years after the end of a devastating war. Those strolls were amusingly rejected by both sides of the 38th parallel: the North because it didn’t mention Kim Il-Sung and the South simply because it had been made on the other side of the frontier. No such rejection appears in Quelle heure est-elle ? (2004-2008) although Chris Marker stole pictures ‘like abenevolent paparazzo’, as he himself recalls. Inspired by a short unforgettable poem by Ezra Pound, ‘The apparition of these faces in the crowd / Petals on a wet, black bough’, he started taking pictures inside the Paris subway. His aim in collecting these ‘petals’ was to give people their best moment, often imperceptible in the stream of time, making them truer to their inner selves. He started the experience with a wristwatch camera, hence the title. Although he later used different contraptions, the title remained, reminding that the stolen moment of a woman’s face tells something about Time itself… The same idea is developed in the series PASSENGERS.‘Cocteau used to say that, at night, statues escape from museums and go walking in the streets’, explains Marker who sometimes made unusual encounters of models of famous painters inside the Paris subway, eerie figures lost in time. These images, in colour, illustrate the various ways in which people create invisible boundaries in order to cope with modern urban life. The modern finally meets the tradition of arts in another series, After Dürer, where Marker uses the engravings of the German printmaker and revisits them. Silent Movie and The Hollow Men also questions the linearity of narration and history. The first installation presents a highly personal response to the 100th anniversary of the invention of cinema, while the second one reflects on the European wasteland that resulted from the First World War. The most famous film of Chris Marker, La Jetée, is also shown in Arles, as well as a virtual event dealing with his recent work on Second Life, a platform accessible on the Internet.

Peter Blum, curator. Exhibition produced in collaboration with Peter Blum Gallery, New York.
Projection: La Jetée, 1963, courtesy of Argos Films.
Multimedia installation produced by Coïncidence with the collaboration of Max Moswitzer.
Framing of some images by Circad, Paris.
Exhibition venue: Palais de l’Archevêché.

 

JR
JR has the biggest art gallery in the world. He exhibits freely in the streets, and it brings him to the attention of people who don’t usually go to museums. His work mixes art and action and is concerned with commitment, freedom, identity and boundaries. After he found a camera in the Paris metro in 2001, he used it to explore the universe of urban art before putting it to work on the vertical boundaries, in forbidden basements and on Paris roofs. In 2006, he created Portrait of a Generation, portraits of young people from the banlieue housing projects, which he displayed in super-large format in rich districts of Paris. This illegal project became official when the Municipality of Paris posted JR’s photos on its own buildings. In 2007, with Marco, he realised Face 2 Face, the largest illegal photo exhibition ever created. JR posted huge portraits of Israelis and Palestinians, face to face, in eight Palestinian and Israeli cities and on either side of the dividing security wall. In 2008, he set off on a long international odyssey for a project on the dignity of women. And in the same period, he set up the project Wrinkles of the City, recounting the history and the memory of a country through the wrinkles of its inhabitants, after showing his work to the Arles public in 2007. In 2010, his film Women are Heroes was a contender at the Cannes Film Festival for the Caméra d’Or. In 2011, he was awarded the prestigious TED Prize. His reaction was to state his ‘desire to change the world’—a project involving everyone and anyone in a large-format poster project to convey their message. The first country, to date, where an action like this has already been undertaken is Tunisia. JR creates ‘infiltrating art’, which gets posted uninvited. People who often live with the bare minimum discover in it something totally superfluous. And they don’t just look at it, they get involved. Old ladies become models for a day, kids turn into artists for a week. In artistic action of this sort, there is no stage to separate the actors from the audience. After the local exhibitions, the images get taken to New York, Berlin, Paris or Amsterdam, where people interpret them in the light of their own experience. Since he remains anonymous and doesn’t explain his gigantic, grimacing portraits, JR leaves ample space for encounter between subject as actor and passer-by as interpreter. JR’s work consists of asking questions.
Screening produced by Coïncidence.
Screening at the Théâtre Antique on Saturday, 9 July.

WANG QINGSONG
Born in 1966 in the Heilongjiang Province, China. Lives and works in Beijing.
Wang Qingsong worked for eight years as a painter working in oil. He was accepted into Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 1991. After graduation, he moved to Beijing. Witnessing the drastic transformations affecting this big city, he found that paint and brush failed to capture the dramatic speed of modernization, with the influx of new ideas and consumerism. In 1996, he switched to photography, a better tool to get hold of the tempo and ethos of urban cities, using it to stage large-scale tableaux vivants. His photo work, like pieces concentrating a multitude of observations, vividly depicts the current China in his mind, referring to many unsatisfactory sections in this blindfolded chase for urbanization.

THE HISTORY OF MONUMENTS
Since August 2009, I started to work with two hundred models over fifteen days, shooting the 42-metre-long History of Monuments. This work is my reflection on what is told about civilisations, beauties, virtues, standards and norms… The models are smeared with mud and placed into the carved out contours of the photo backdrop. Chinese traditions are handed down from generation to generation with many documents on the historical figures, poetries, literature, dramas, etc. Often the powerful people like to summarize their achievements during their reign times. So each dynasty has its interpretations of its dynasty and the former dynasties. It is undeniable that many such versions are misguided.
Wang Qingsong
www.wangqingsong.com
Prints by Picto, Paris.
Exhibition produced with the support of BMW.
Exhibition venue: église des Trinitaires.

REPUBLIC
THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION
PHOTOGRAPHS AND REVOLUTION
When I saw for the first time the photographs taken in 1911 by the Englishman Jimmy Hare in Ciudad Juárez, I had the feeling of looking at something that was unfamiliar to me. This feeling was disconcerting, for the pictures had been shot in my home town. Whence came this sense of unease? At first I thought it stemmed from the boldness of viewpoint typical of this great war photographer. Yet, as the years passed, I realized something else had troubled me: The concept of the Revolution that had for a very long time held sway over my imagination came from a set number of images published over the course of sixty years, a collection that did not include Jimmy Hare’s photographs, nor those of a good many others. Did it not follow that what was missing was a history of photographs of the Revolution, which this time might include the point of view of almost every photographer who left us evidence of this historic process? This is precisely what we have done in Mexico: Photography and Revolution. We have made a particular effort in this book to discover why and by what processes such a large quantity of photographs were kept out of circulation at the time, and what kind of impact that absence might have had on our country’s visual memory. The exhibition that we are presenting at Arles represents a new challenge because, while it is certainly based on the book*, it also requires building a narrative based almost exclusively on period prints available for loan to France. The results have been extremely interesting because, far from creating problems for the collection, photographs which were not part of the original editorial project have come to enrich it. What is more, based on the vast number of items we were able to bring together for this exhibition, we can claim to have assembled here, beyond any doubt, a larger and more complete exhibition of photographs of the Mexican Revolution and its era than has ever been seen before.
Miguel Ángel Berumen, curator of the exhibition.
*México : fotografía y revolución, Lunwerg Editores and the Televisa Foundation.
Exhibition produced in collaboration and with the support of the Televisa Foundation, Mexico.
Exhibition venue: Espace Van Gogh.

GRACIELA ITURBIDE, THE FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE COLLECTION
Born in 1942 in Mexico City. Lives and works in Mexico City.
Graciela Iturbide turned to photography only after the death of one of her daughters in the 1970s. She met her mentor Manuel Álvarez Bravo, the teacher, cinematographer and photographer, at university and started taking pictures of everyday life, almost entirely in black-and-white. Iturbide has been a strong supporter of feminism since her very first collection in 1979, titled Angel Woman, and in her collection Our Lady of the Iguana, shot in a city where women dominate town life. In Mexico, she is renowned for being a founding member of the Mexican Council of Photography. Her work is now shown all around the world, and she has travelled in Argentina, India and the United States where she won the W. Eugene Smith prize and recently the Hasselblad Foundation Photography Award (2008).
Graciela Iturbide is one of the most outstanding Mexican photographers on the contemporary world scene. Over a four-decade career she has built an oeuvre that is intense and deeply singular, fundamental for understanding the development of photography in Mexico and the rest of Latin America. Her contribution and talent have been recognised with the recent granting (2008) of the Hasselblad Award, the world’s highest distinction in photography. Renowned for her portraits of the Seri Indians, who inhabit the desert region of Sonora, for her vision of the women of Juchitán (on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca), and for her fascinating essay on the birds that she has spent so many years photographing, Graciela Iturbide’s visual itinerary has spanned such contrasting countries as Spain, United States, India, Italy and Madagascar in addition to her native Mexico. Her curiosity about the different forms of cultural diversity have turned travel into a work dynamic through which she expresses her artistic need: ‘to photograph as a pretext for getting to know’, as she herself puts it. Midway between the documentary and the poetic, her unusual way of looking through the lens integrates what has been experienced and what has been dreamed in a complex web of historical, social and cultural references. The fragility of ancestral traditions and their difficult survival, the interaction between nature and culture, the importance of ritual in everyday body language and the symbolic dimension of landscapes and randomly found objects are paramount to her richly productive career. Her work is characterised by an ongoing dialogue among images, times and symbols, in a poetic display in which dream, ritual, religion, travel and community all blend together. The exhibition presents one of the most comprehensive anthologies of her career to date.
Marta Dahó, commissaire de l’exposition.
Exposition réalisée par la FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE avec la collaboration des Rencontres d’Arles.
Exposition présentée à l’Espace Van Gogh.

GABRIEL FIGUEROA, THE WIDE-RANGING EYE
Born in 1907 in Mexico City. Died in 1997 in Mexico City.

Gabriel Figueroa lost his father and mother shortly after his birth. Cared for by his aunts, he was encouraged to pursue his interest in the arts, and a family bankruptcy led to him working, at the age of fourteen, in the darkroom of a photography studio. In 1932 he made his debut in the movie industry as a stills photographer, with the help of cameraman Alex Phillips Sr. then found him a scholarship to go to Hollywood, and under the auspices of Gregg Toland he learnt all about lighting in Sam Goldwyn’s studio. Back in Mexico, in 1936 he made his first film as cameraman, Allá en el Rancho Grande, with director Fernando de Fuentes; the film took first prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1938. The Figueroa style really took shape when he met Emilio Fernández in 1943: they would go on to make twenty-six films together during what was the golden age of Mexican cinema. In 1950 he met Luis Buñuel, with whom he made seven films. Despite many attempts to put him under contract—by Orson Welles and Walt Disney, among others—Figueroa never gave up the creative freedom he found in his home country. Gabriel Figueroa Mateos brought his wide-ranging eye to bear on more than half a century of Mexican cinema.
In the course of a prolific image-making career he was a studio portraitist, photojournalist, stills man, lighting engineer, cameraman, director of photography and an emblematic figure in a dream factory that provided several generations of Mexicans with entertainment and an initiation into the world of the emotions.
The Figueroa filmography comprises over two hundred works displaying his technical skill, mastery of sophisticated framing and light and shade, an aesthetic affinity with the other visual arts and an ability to adapt to the changing rhythms of an art that was as much an industry as a form of diversion. Acclaimed at the world’s leading film festivals for his talent with lighting and the camera, he was called on by such celebrated directors as John Ford, Luis Buñuel and John Huston. This exhibition in the form of a video installation offers an overview of the vivid repertoire of someone who brought to the screen the passions, faces and landscapes of a people chosen by the sun and darkly overwhelmed by tragedy. Moving through the exhibition, the viewer will discover, even if only fragmentarily, the sheer diversity of the genres Figueroa’s calling embraced: thrillers, comedies, tragicomedies, melodramas, historical epics and adaptations of novels and serials. A trip through the real and illusory worlds the eye of a cameraman has enabled viewers to see, glimpse or imagine, the exhibition above all confirms the existence of a multitude of Mexicos—some of them no more than pure images of seduction...

Alfonso Morales, curator of the exhibition
Exhibition produced by the Televisa Foundation in collaboration with the Rencontres d’Arles.
Exhibition venue: église des Frères-Prêcheurs.

ENRIQUE METINIDES
Born in 1934 in Mexico City. Lives and works in Mexico City.
Enrique Metinides Tsironides was born into a family of Greek immigrants living in Mexico. At the age of ten his father gave him his first camera. He shot his first rolls of street life and stills inspired by his favorite gangster movies. At twelve he began photographingthe work of the police and worked with the photographer ‘El Indio’ for the newspaper La Prensa. He only resigned in 1997, when the newspaper was bought and he and 450 co-op members found themselves unemployed. In 2000 the first book of Metinides, El Teatro de los Hechos, was published. Since then, Metinides’ work has been seen in major group shows in Mexico City, PS1 New York, Photo España, San Francisco MOMA and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Solo exhibitions include Anton Kern Gallery in New York and Blum and Poe in Los Angeles. Two exhibitions are also planned this year in Berlin and New York.

101 TRAGEDIES
101 Tragedies brings together a collection of photographs and narratives by the Mexican photographer Enrique Metinides, who makes his own selection of images and tells his own stories. Metinides remembers everything; the streets, the characters, the families, the sadness, as much as the heroism of the emergency workers and the ‘audience’ of onlookers relieved to be watching, not participating in the dramas he captures. Metinides catalogues his images according to type: train, bicycle, car or bus accident / plane crash / suicide / murder / hanging / drowning—everything is meticulously filed, stored, recorded. He creates order from the madness of the witnessed chaos he has photographed. Metinides’ work is unique and stands apart from contemporary tabloid drama photography, Nota Roja, which still sells on the streets of Mexico City. His images are distinct from the new sensationalism; his photographs, while powerful, are often filled with their own humanity, with their sense of detail and their awareness of both accident and cultural context. His work is cinematic at times and intimate at others, and his photographs present themselves as short narratives—single frame movies, so to speak.  As a child Metinides loved to go to the cinema and shoot stills from the screen, and their influence is evident in his photography. His home is filled with a DVD collection that ranges from Cagney to contemporary car chase spectaculars. Metinides is a film maker of stills. Metinides has worked in Mexico City all his life—rarely leaving the city, never leaving the country; yet he has probably seen more than most. Now retired from the streets, he has begun a new series of works that revisit the scenes he once witnessed and documented. He creates hybrid images by bringing into the frame the toys of his massive collection of miniature firemen, police and ambulance workers against the backdrop of his original images like a stage set of earlier work. In this way he creates new works that hover on the edge of child-like innocence, horror and the absurd. Metinides does not belong in the tabloid world of this millennium; his work has little to do with the formulaic sensationalism of the present or with the narcotics drama which represents contemporary Mexico in the media. His work is unique, guided by his own reflections of a lifetime’s work. 101 Tragedies is a series of single frame films. Narrated by Metinides. Told through his stills and his words.
Trisha Ziff, co-curator of the exhibition, with Enrique Metinides, Guillaume Zuili and Lucía

González de Durana Villa.
Prints by LMI, Mexico and Dupon, Paris.
Framing by Jean-Pierre Gapihan, Paris.
Exhibition produced with 212 BERLIN, Mexico City and KLMI fotolabs, Mexico.
Exhibition venue: Atelier des Forges, Parc des Ateliers.

DANIELA ROSSELL
Born in 1973 in Mexico. Lives and works in New York.
After studying theatre in Mexico, Daniela Rossell specialized in painting at the National School of Visual Arts in Mexico in 1993. At the age of twenty-three her works were shown at a solo exhibition at Galeria OMR in Mexico. Her series Ricas y famosas (Rich and Famous) has been exhibited at Salamanca, Spain (2003); at the Centro Cultural de Caja Tenerife, in the Canary Islands; at PhotoEspaña in Madrid, as well as at venues in Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles. She is represented by the Greene Naftali Gallery in New York City. Her work has also appeared in group shows, including Tendencies: New Art from Mexico City in Vancouver, Canada; Hybrid Cultures: Works from Mexico City and Montreal in Montreal; and at Hierbabuena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, in the Mexcelente exhibition. Her publication: Ricas y famosas (Turner, 2002, 176 pages).

PRIVATE WORLDS, PUBLIC ILLUSIONS
There is one image in Ricas y famosas that depicts very clearly the complex relationship of complicity underlying photographer Daniela Rossell’s book about the identity, domesticity and imagery of Mexico’s upper classes. In front of a mural of an orientalist harem, eight women pose, as though they too were odalisques. […] While the painted odalisques appear indifferent to our imaginary visit, the ‘real ones’ face the camera with a tremendous sense of self, almost always gazing directly into the lens… All eight women appear to be bold about the photographic image, yet at the same time afraid ofit. They know they are making their faces and bodies available for public consumption, and they have adopted conventional poses from film and magazines for the purpose. […] More than the papers the women may have signed to release the photographer from any charge of intrusion into their private lives, the photographs themselves acknowledge to perfection the existence of a contract. These women have used the photographer as much as she has used them. What makes Rossell’s images so radical is not simply that they open the doors of houses closed off to us by bodyguards. (The gossip magazines and society pages in the newspaper do that already, and no one bats an eye.) More than showing us how the privileged live, Ricas y famosas conjures up the way they would like to live, what they imagine they are like. All of Rossell’s photographs depict a contradictory multitude of fantasies acquired in a disorderly fashion from antiques shops, department stores, safaris. They document one class’s desperate effort to create ‘someplace else’ that is distinct from the collage of abject rural poverty in which the rest of us live. […] Ricas y famosas is, therefore, a traveller’s guide through a series of pseudo-aristocratic tropical Disneylands: escapist locales populated equally by the ghosts of revolutionary priista (Revolutionary and Institutional Party of Mexico) iconography, the unbearable sentimentalism of stuffed animals, and—more often than one might like—works of art. […] The task of contemporary art is often not so much to comment as it is to compel comment… Politically, its effect is to intervene in the indifferent flow of signs and images. What gives Rossell’s book its merit is not so much having produced a thesis about the people she portrayed, but rather putting into circulation visual objects that force viewers to portray themselves in public. […] Rossell’s art is one of provocation. It’s provoking a cascade of commentary.
Cuauhtémoc Medina
From review: C. Medina: ‘El Ojo Breve. Mundos privados, ilusiones públicas’, Reforma.

September 11, 2002. Translated by Trudy Balch in Witness to Her Art. Art and Writings by

Adrian Piper, Mona Hatoum, Cady Noland, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker, Daniela Rossell and Eau de

Cologne. Edited by Rhea Anastas with Michael Brenson. Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, Center

for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 2006, p. 332.
Prints by: BS Imagen Virtual, Mexico.
Exhibition venue: Atelier des Forges, Parc des Ateliers.

MAYA GODED
Born in 1970 in Mexico City. Lives and works in Mexico City.
Maya Goded began studying photography and sociology in Mexico City in 1985 before leaving for the International Center of Photography in New York. She started working in 1993 as assistant to the photographer Graciela Iturbide. In 2001 she was the recipient of the prestigious W. Eugene Smith Fund Award for her work with prostitutes in Mexico City, Plaza de la Soledad. In 2007, her exhibition Let’s all go back to the streets was held at the Casa de América in Madrid, in 2007, and in the same year another exhibition of her work was held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Mexico City. She has exhibited in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe and China. Her publications include Nosotras (Filigranes, 2004) and Good Girls (Umbridge, 2006).

WELCOME TO LIPSTICK
These photographs were taken in a red-light district close to the Mexico-United States border, behind walls concealing the prostitutes from the rest of society. Violent and lawless, this once-flourishing neighbourhood now seems entirely inhabited by ghosts, and few people dare to visit. But despite this decline, these women’s struggle for survival keeps their district alive.

LAND OF WITCHES
After finishing the work on the series Missing about the women who disappeared or were killed on the Mexican border of the USA, the need to change destiny, do justice to impunity and work on my own fear was born. So I decided to make a few trips to northern Mexico, to look for my own healing, and restore my love for photography. After these trips, the photographic series called Land of Witches was created. In Latin America, the Spanish conquest brought with Catholicism the persecution of women related to witchcraft, both Spanish and indigenous. These local people, called  ‘shamans’ or witch doctors, had a great knowledge of herbs and the balance with their environment. Although the witchhunt was a common practice, these beliefs continued to be practised clandestinely and are still alive throughout Mexico. The witches I look for, in the most Catholic states, are a mix of European and indigenous. In these villages everybody goes to look for them but, fearing their power, in the end they become outcasts because they are different from other women living in the village.
Maya Goded
Framing by Jean-Pierre Gapihan and Plasticollage, Paris (for Land of Witches).
Screening produced by Maya Goded and Coïncidence (for Welcome to Lipstick).
Exhibition venue: Atelier des Forges, Parc des Ateliers.

DULCE PINZÓN
Née en 1974 à Mexico. Vit et travaille à Brooklyn.
Dulce Pinzón studied mass media communications at the Universidad de las Américas in Puebla Mexico and photography at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. In 1995 she moved to New York where she studied at the International Center of Photography. Her work has been published and collected internationally. In 2001 her photos were used for the cover of a publication of Howard Zinn’s book A People’s History of the United States. In 2002 she won the prestigious Jóvenes Creadores grant in Mexico for her work, the twelfth edition of the Mexican Biennial of El Centro de La Imagen and was a 2006 fellow in photography from the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2008 she was a Ford Foundation grantee and in 2010 she recieved an award from the Gaea Foundation/Sea Change Residency for her series The Real Story of the Superheroes. She recently took first place in the Sixth International Photography Symposium: Mazatlán Abierto for the same series. Now she is planning to publish her first photography book.

THE REAL STORY OF THE SUPERHEROES
After September 11, the notion of the ‘hero’ began to rear its head in the public consciousness more and more frequently. It served a necessity, in a time of national and global crisis, to acknowledge those who showe extraordinary determination in the face of danger, sometimes even sacrificing their lives in an attempt to save others. However, in the whirlwind of journalism surrounding these deservedly front-page disasters and emergencies, it is easy to take for granted the heroes who sacrifice immeasurable life and labor in their day-to-day lives for the good of others, but do so in a somewhat less spectacular setting. The Mexican immigrant worker in New York is a perfect example of the hero who has gone unnoticed.

It is common for a Mexican worker in New York to work very long hours in extreme conditions for low wages which are saved at great cost and sacrifice and sent to families and communities in Mexico who rely on them to survive. The Mexican economy has quietly become dependent on the money sent from workers in the United States. Conversely, the U.S. economy has quietly become dependent on the labor of Mexican immigrants. Along with the depth of their sacrifice, it is the quietness of this dependence which makes Mexican immigrant workers a subject of interest. The principal objective of this series is to pay homage to these brave and determined men and women who somehow manage, without the help of any supernatural power, to withstand extreme conditions of labor in order to help their families and communities survive and prosper. This project consists of twenty color photographs of Latino immigrants dressed in the costumes of popular American and Mexican superheroes. Each photo pictures the worker/superhero in their work environment and is accompanied by a short text including the worker’s name, their hometown, the number of years they have been working in New York, and the amount of money they send to their families each week.
Screening produced by Coïncidence.
Exhibition venue: Atelier des Forges, Parc des Ateliers.

INAKI BONILLAS
Born in 1981 in Mexico City. Lives and works in Mexico City.
Since the late 1990s, Iñaki Bonillas has established a deep relationship with photography in

his work. With a regard for the aesthetics
and the conceptual practices of the sixties and seventies, he has been gradually isolating the

constituent elements of photography
and connecting them with other procedures. In 2003 Bonillas introduced the vast photo archives

of his grandfather, J. R.
Plaza, into his work. His work has been shown recently in various exhibitions such as Les

enfants terribles, Colección / Fundación
Jumex, Mexico City; El mal de escritura, MACBA, Barcelona, and Little Theater of Gestures,

Museum für Gegenwartskunst,
Basel, and Malmö Konsthall. Iñaki Bonillas is represented by ProjecteSD, Barcelona, Galerie

Greta Meert, Brussels, and
Galería OMR, Mexico City. Next fall the exhibition Archivo J. R. Plaza will open at La

Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona.

DOUBLE CHIAROSCURO
In 2003, Iñaki Bonillas let the vast photographic archive of his grandfather
J. R. Plaza enter into his practice, as a continuous source of meditations on photography that

often turn to elements that seem a priori incompatible: on the one hand a biographical

narrative and on the other a quasi-scientific element of compilation. This time Bonillas has

chosen to work with a single image taken from the archive, with the idea of exploring the

possibility, not only of creating a new set of images (through juxtaposition,

recontextualisation or any other way of reinterpretating the original source), but of creating

a whole new archive. More than the mere flexibility of images, the purpose then is to show how

images are capable of giving birth to distinct visual realms. The image at issue is a portrait

of the great-grandfather of the artist that shows the remains of an old grid, once traced with

the aid of a pencil all over the picture, with the intention of making a copy. This given

partition allows the artist to work with 104 images instead of just one: 104 elements that are

not just fragments of a bigger image, but images in their own rights, ready to be used as

such. By renouncing the figurativeness of the photograph (the possibility of subject

recognition), the artist is able to search for different ways of displaying this new abstract

archive. But the images at this point are no longer photographic either (they have become

indiscernible), so Bonillas can also work from this neutrality and explore four different

techniques and methods, including a 16 mm film and a meticulous graphite drawing. It is

important to mention that the original photograph has another peculiarity: it was taken in

such a way that a situation of double chiaroscuro takes place, because gradations of

background and foreground light intersect. This luminous phenomenon of crossed axes gives the

artist the opportunity to work with a richness of grey tones.
Exhibition organised in collaboration with the ProjecteSD Gallery in Barcelona.
Exhibition venue: couvent Saint-Césaire.

FERNANDO MONTIEL KLINT
Born in Mexico in 1978. Lives and works in Mexico.
Fernando Montiel Klint studied photography in the Escuela Activa de Fotografía and Centro de

la Imágen. His work is a part of such collections as Guandong Museum of Art in Guangzhou,

China; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chile; Nave K, Spain; Museum of Modern Art of

Aguascalientes, Mexico. His work has been exhibited in solo and group shows in museums

worldwide,
like the Palais des Beaux Arts, Belgium; Patagonia Museum, Argentina; Colegio de arquitectos,

Murcia, Spain; Victoria & Albert Museum in London; Santralistanbul, Istanbul Bilgi University

in Turkey; El Palau de la Virreina, Barcelona; La Triennale de Milano. He has received grants

from Omnilife, I D Magazine, First Place at the XXII Young Art National Encounter Mexico and

received Honorable Mention in the XXXIII Young Art National Encounter Mexico and Finalist on

Critical Mass E.U.A. Some of the art fairs where his work has been are: Preview Berlin, Slick

Paris, Scope Basel Switzerland, Maco Mexico, PhotoMiami,
MadridFoto and he is represented in Mexico by Emma Molina, Spain Galeria Fernando Pradilla,

New York CTS gallery.

ACTS OF FAITH
The society we have ended up with atomises and isolates its members, the technology co-dependents we’ve become, individualists and consumersengulfed by a near-unearthly quest for total pleasure in which we are ceasing to recognise and know ourselves for what we intrinsically are. Interaction has been ousted by virtual simulation within which introspection and the search for being, for the interior, free-souled ‘I’, are shrinking inexorably. What is the exact meaning of ‘faith’ here? My focus is on exploration of the act of faith in contemporary life without reference to religion. I recreate my mental liberation through mises en scène and actions that are caught by the camera; actions in which, searching for introspection, I invent deceitful realities composed of absurd ambiences. Introspection is also a path of light leading towards contemplation and individual liberation, towards moments of inspiration during which, in a mental culmination, the infinite is disclosed to me like a revelation. That which has no end—that which is of the essence—transcends this world; faith replaces logic, transforming itself into an eternal, circular act.
Fernando Montiel Klint
Prints by Dupon, Paris
Framing by Plasticollage, Paris.
Exhibition venue: cloître Saint-Trophime.
www.klintandphoto.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DOCUMENTS

THE MEXICAN SUITCASE : ROBERT CAPA, CHIM (DAVID SEYMOUR), GERDA TARO

The legendary ‘Mexican suitcase’ containing Robert Capa’s Spanish Civil War negatives, considered lost since 1939, has recently been rediscovered and is exhibited here for the first time. The suitcase is in fact three small boxes containing nearly 4,500 negatives, not only by Capa but also by his fellow photojournalists, all Jews in exile, Chim (David Seymour) and Gerda Taro. These negatives span the course of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), through Chim’s in-depth coverage in 1936-37, Taro’s intrepid documentation until her death in battle in July 1937, and Capa’s incisive reportage until the last months of the conflict. Additionally, there are several rolls of film by Fred Stein showing mainly portraits of Taro, which after her death became inextricably linked to images of the war itself. Between 1936 and 1940, the negatives were passed from hand to hand for safekeeping, and ended up in Mexico City, where they resurfaced in 2007. The Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936. In the broadest terms, the war was a military coup, led by General Francisco Franco and instigated to overthrow the democratically elected government of the Spanish Republic, a coalition of leftists and centrists. From its inception, the civil war aroused the passions of those who saw Franco’s actions as the front line of a rising tide of fascism across Europe, as he received material support from Germany and Italy. Many leftist intellectuals and artists were committed to theantifascist struggle, and they provided vivid images and texts in support of the Republican cause for the international press. The Mexican suitcase negatives constitute an extraordinary window onto the vast output of these three photographers during this period: portraits, battle sequences, and the harrowing effects of the war on civilians. While some of this work was known through vintage prints and reproductions, the Mexican suitcase negatives, seen here as enlarged modern contact sheets, show us for the first time the order in which the images were shot, as well as images that have never been seen before. This material not only provides a uniquely rich view of the Spanish Civil War, a conflict that changed the course of European history, but also demonstrates how the work of three photojournalists laid the foundation for modern war photography.

Cynthia Young, curator of the exhibition.
First show of this exhibition after New York, organised by the International Center of Photography, New York. This exhibition and its catalogue were made possible with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts, Frank and Mary Ann Arisman, and Christian Keesee. Additional support was received from Sandy and

Ellen Luger.
Enlargement by Dupon, Paris.
Exhibition produced with the support of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès.
Exhibition venue: Musée Départemental de l’Arles Antique.

CHIM (DAVID SEYMOUR)
Born in 1911 in Warsaw. Deceased in 1956 in Suez.
Chim was born Dawid Szymin (Warsaw, November 20, 1911–Suez, November 10, 1956) into an intellectual family of publishers of Yiddish and Hebrew books. In 1933, after studying graphic arts in Leipzig, he turned to photography to support himself while continuing his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. Soon he was recognized for his strong photographs of political events of the Popular Front and became a regular contributor to the French Communist magazine Regards. Like Capa, he covered the entirety of the Spanish Civil War. But unlike Capa and Taro, who sought to photograph on the front lines, Chim’s great achievement is his focus on individuals outside of battle: from formal portraits of major figures to images of soldiers on the home front and peasants laboring in small towns. He was attuned to the complicated politics of the war and imbued his images with nuanced meaning. He is, with Robert Capa, one of the founding fathers of Magnum Photos agency, in 1947.

GERDA TARO
Born in 1910 in Stuttgart. Deceased in 1937 in Brunete, Spain.
Gerda Taro was one of the first recognised women photojournalists.
Born Gerta Pohorylle in Stuttgart (August 1, 1910–Brunete, Spain, July 26, 1937) and raised in Leipzig in a middle-class Jewish family, she fled to Paris in 1933. She soon met ‘André’ Friedmann and started photographing; in the spring of 1936, they reinvented themselves as Robert Capa and Gerda Taro. In August 1936, Taro and Capa arrived in Spain as freelancers to document the Republican cause for the French press. She became a pioneering photojournalist whose brief career consisted almost exclusively of dramatic photographs from the front lines of the Spanish Civil War. Her later style is similar to Capa’s, but it differs in her interest in formal compositions and a level of intensity in photographing morbid subjects. Taro worked alongside Capa and the two collaborated closely. While covering the crucial Battle of Brunete, she was struck by a tank and died. Taro was the first female photographer to be killed while reporting on war.

ROBERT CAPA
Born in 1913 in Budapest. Deceased in 1954 in Thai Binh, Indochina.
Robert Capa is one of the most well known photojournalists of the twentieth century. Born Endre Ernö Friedmann in a family of Jewish tailors, he was forced to leave Hungary at the age of seventeen because of leftist student activities; he fled to Berlin, where he enrolled at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik as a student of journalism. With no money, no profession, and little knowledge of German, he turned to the camera as a means of earning a living. In 1933, he moved to Paris, where he met Chim, Stein, and Taro. Quickly gaining a reputation for his photographs of the Spanish Civil War, his work was characterized as viscerally close to the action, as had rarely been seen before. In roll after roll of film in the so-called Mexican suitcase, one can see Capa move with his subjects, chasing the action, seeking to understand and experience events as his subjects do. In 1947, Robert Capa creates the Magnum Photos agency with Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and

Chim (David Seymour).

TRISHA ZIFF, THEMEXICAN SUITCASE (DOCUMENTARY)
Born in the UK. Lives and works in Mexico City.
Trisha Ziff began working as a political activist using photography and film in the North of Ireland, establishing Camerawork Derry in 1982 during the British war of occupation. She returned to London in the mid-eighties to direct Network Photographers. She then moved to Mexico City and focused on curatorial work. Her exhibitions have been seen at major international museums including: Victoria & Albert Museum, London, International Center for Photography, New York, Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City. She was involved in the production of a CD Rom (Voyager), I Photograph to Remember. Her work on Che Guevara was first seen in Arles in 2004, and she went on to produce a major touring show and film, Chevolution. 2008. Earlier films she produced and co-produced: Oaxacalifornia (Faction Films, 1995), My Mexican Shiva and 9 months 9 days (2009). She recently finished her latest documentary La Maleta Mexicana (Mallerich Films and 212 BERLIN, 2010). Currently she is developing a new feature documentary,

PIRATE COPY, which looks at the politics and issues of piracy of film and images. She recently curated a major show of Maya Goded, Las Olvidadas, for Arts Block, California, and is collaborating with Enrique Metinides on his retrospective. Mexican Suitcase is the story of three boxes that disappeared in Paris in 1939 and were recovered in Mexico City in 2007. These boxes contain over 4,200 photographic negatives taken during the Spanish Civil War by three photographers, exiles from Hungary, Poland and Germany, who met in Paris and traveled to Spain to fight fascism with their cameras. Robert Capa (23), David Seymour (Chim) (28) and Gerda Taro, who would die in Spain while on assignment before her 27th birthday. Various theories of just how the negatives found their way into a closet in Mexico City are explored and in the process shed light on Mexico’s extraordinary involvement in the Spanish Civil War. This is a story of exile and freedom, loss and recovery. A story of contradictions: what one man dismissed, another man searched for and a third man after hesitating, returned. It is a story of survival. Mexican Suitcase reveals the content of these boxes and explores what their importance is for us today as much as it reveals about our past. Mexican Suitcase examines Mexico’s unique support to the Spanish Republic and its welcoming of tens of thousands of refugees, as told through the narrative of the suitcase. The film was shot on a Canon 5D camera, a still camera, by cinematographer Claudio Rocha. Directed by Trisha Ziff, 212 BERLIN and produced by Eamon O’Farrill (Mexico), the film was co-produced with Mallerich Films, Barcelona (Producers Paco Poch and Victor Cavalier). The film will be released later in 2011.

The film is 90 minutes in length, digital and shot in 35mm.
Gala screening, for the first time, on July 5, 2011 at the Théâtre Antique.

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE PHOTOGRAPHS
For over thirty years, the weekly New York Times Magazine has shaped the possibilities of

magazine photography,through its commissioning and publishing of photographers’ work across the spectrum of the

medium, from photojournalism to fashion photography and portraiture. In this exhibition, long-time New York

Times Magazine photo editor Kathy Ryan provides a behind-the-scenes look at the collaborative,

creative processes of the past fifteen years that have made this magazine the leading venue

for photographic storytelling within contemporary news media. The exhibition is comprised of

eleven individual modules, each of which focuses on a notable project or series of projects

that have been presented in the pages of the magazine. While by no means comprehensive, the

projects featured in the exhibition mirror the magazine’s eclecticism, presenting seminal

examples of reportage, portraiture, as well as fine art photography. Using visual materials

drawn from different stages of the commissioning process—shot lists, work prints and contact

sheets, videos, tear sheets and framed prints—the magazine’s collaborative methodology is

revealed from initial idea to the published page, and, in some cases, its continuation beyond

magazine publication, for example when a subject that began as an assignment has become a part

of a photographer’s ongoing work. The exhibition includes an extensive series of blow-ups of

selected tearsheets and covers from the last thirty-years of the
magazine.

About Kathy Ryan, curator of the exhibition and editor-in-chief if the New York Times Magazine

: under her leadership, the magazine has won numerous awards from The Pictures of the Year

competition, World Press Photo, The Society of Publication Designers, and The Overseas Press

Club. She was recognized as Canon Picture Editor of the Year in 1997 at the Visa Pour L’Image

Festival in Perpignan and in 2003 was named Picture Editor of the Year by the Lucie Awards.
About Aperture : located in New York’s Chelsea art district—is a world-renowned non-profit

publisher and exhibition
space dedicated to promoting photography in all its forms. Aperture was founded in 1952 by

photographers
Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Barbara Morgan and Minor White; historian Beaumont Newhall; and

writer/curator Nancy Newhall, among others. These visionaries created a new quarterly

periodical, Aperture magazine,
to foster both the development and the appreciation of the photographic medium and its

practitioners. In the 1960s, Aperture expanded to include the publication of books (over five

hundred to date) that comprise
one of the most comprehensive and innovative libraries in the history of photography and art.

Aperture’s
programs now include artist lectures and panel discussions, limited-edition photographs, and

traveling
exhibitions that show at major museums and arts institutions in the United States and

internationally.
Kathy Ryan et Lesley Martin, curators of the exhibition.
Exhibition produced with Les Rencontres d’Arles by the Aperture Foundation.
Prints by Picto (for the exhibition in the cloître Saint-Trophime).
Exhibition venue: église Sainte-Anne and cloître Saint-Trophime.
MANO A MANO VII / TENDANCE FLOUE
The last fifteen years have seen a real upheaval in photojournalism as a profession.The

digitisation of both
photography and the circulation of images has ensured the supremacy of three big agencies—

Reuters, Agence France Presse and Associated Press—working with a network of some hundred

correspondents around the world. This process of relocation, combined with dumping at below-

market prices, triggered the decline of the agencies, notably those founded in France in the

late 1960s—the most iconic being Gamma, Sygma and Sipa. Quickly followed by drastic cuts to

editorial budgets, the market shift was devastating for photographers and for the agencies as

subcontractors. Then came the Internet phenomenon, with amateur photographers only too

delighted to step in as reporters for a day. In this atmosphere of the end of a golden age we

thought it might be interesting to set up a dialogue between two agencies which,

paradoxically, started in the 2000s: VII (pronounced ‘seven’) based in Brooklyn / New York and

Tendance Floue from Montreuil in the Paris suburbs. Both have been set up and self-managed by

photographers and have chosen two very different approaches to their métier.
François Hébel, artistic director of the Rencontres d’Arles
In theory the VII agency and Tendance Floue are diametrically opposed. The former comprises a

group of
recognised photojournalists covering topical events or global issues on assignment for leading

magazines. VII is a touchstone in this respect, with its photographers ‘at the cutting edge of

the news’. The latter is made up of individuals exploring the world via a highly atypical

creative workshop. Tendance Floue involves a pooling of energy in which the photographer takes

a back seat to the group as a whole. Group experiences turned into images in different ways

come together as a utopian worldview. Tendance Floue sees itself ‘at the cutting edge of the

present’. This photographic one-night event to mark our respective anniversaries is not an

attempt at a ‘best of’ or an underscoring of what might be considered our differences. On the

contrary, we believe that our explorations of different fields are driven by the same

questionings. Our images exist primarily to challenge, to examine the world via those crucial

issues that lead us to a ‘political’ formulation of how we see things. While a vital part of

photography, this subjectivity exists not to prove a case, but rather to trigger thought or

doubt.
VII et Tendance Floue
Screening at the Théâtre Antique, Wednesday 6 July produced by Coïncidence.
A TRIBUTE TO ROGER THÉROND
He was our father in photography, our mentor, our patron. He was the Eye of Paris Match, the

founder of Photo, the passionate collector. He shared with us his passion for the image. Roger

Thérond died ten years ago. We are keen to pay homage to him along with his family and

friends. We will show the finest pages of Paris Match and the most extraordinary pieces from

his
collection and present tributes from Edmonde Charles-Roux, Sylvie Aubenas, Didier Rapaud,

Olivier Royant, Jean-Francois Leroy, Philippe Garner and Sebastião Salgado.
Jean-Jacques Naudet
Roger Thérond, was born in 1924 in Sète. In 1945, he joined the Écran français as film critic,

with the support of
27
Jacques Prévert. Three years later, in 1948, he became a reporter at Samedi Soir just before

signing up at Jean Prouvost’s Paris-Match, in 1949, as its youngest-ever managing editor. He

was editor in chief at Match in 1962 and left the magazine in 1968. He was invited by

Françoise Giroud to join L’Express as consulting editor. With Walter Carone and André Lacaze,

he launched Photo magazine and joined Publications Filipacchi. In 1976, Daniel Filipacchi

acquired Paris-Match and appointed Roger Thérond as its director. In 1980 Thérond and Jean-Luc
Monterosso created the Grand Prix Paris Match for photojournalism, in the context of Paris’

Photography Month. This prize is awarded by the weekly magazine every two years to a

photojournalist working in daily news. Two years later, Thérond was named vice-president and

editorial director of the Hachette-Filipacchi Press Group. In 1989, with Michel Decron, Jean

Lelièvre and Jean-François Leroy, he founded Visa pour l’Image, the world’s largest
international photojournalism event. In 1996 he became president of the editorial committee of

Hachette-
Filipacchi Media and a member of the board of Lagardère Group. He quit Paris Match in 1999,

after a half century
in which he effectively ‘created’ the magazine, and marked the occasion by exhibiting, for the

first time, his collection of photographic images at the Maison Européenne de la Photo. One of

the most beautiful
collections in the world, its images having the effect of turning contemporary events into an

extraordinary
adventure. He was also a top collector of nineteenth-century photographs. He married Astrid

Doutreleau,
an Arles native, in 1971, and had four children: Émilie, Éléonore, Ève and Tristan. From its

very inception
he was a supporter of Rencontres d’Arles, and was a member of its governing council until his

death.
This tribute has been organised by Jean-Jacques Naudet, Guillaume Clavières and Marc

Brincourt.
Screening at the Théâtre Antique, Wednesday 6 July, produced by Coïncidence.

 

 

 

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