Since the 1970s, the Rencontres d’Arles has been the place to debut the art form’s latest developments. This year’s edition had a more retro feel.
If you ask a photographer working today to name the biggest wrench in the spokes of her craft, you’ll likely get two dreaded initials: A.I.
Except, it seems, in Arles, the bright town of Roman and medieval stone in the south of France that since 1970 has hosted Europe’s pre-eminent photography festival: the Rencontres de la Photographie. This year it brings together some 30 exhibitions in churches, municipal buildings, museums and a grocery store, and is notable for an ostrich-like disregard for the many threats and occasional thrills that in recent years have been attached to the accelerating autonomy of the computer.
Whether by design or chance, the Rencontres elicits this old-school humanity in part by this year’s theme, “Disobedient Images.”
But who’s disobeying? After three days in Arles, I wasn’t sure.
The antique/modern collages of brown-skinned Brazilians by Gê Viana, Caroline Monnet’s Indigenous North American women dressed in neon futurist garb, the brightly colored drag personae by Brandon Gercara in la Réunion or by Lila Neutre in France, and many other shows this year are straight-ahead, performatively disruptive portraiture, in a stylized photojournalism mode, by emerging photographers interested in personal identity and consistently assured that their audience is white.
If this all feels a little “five minutes ago,” it certainly reads that way in Arles. Portraiture is an ancient instinct, and a noble one in the age of computers. But identity-based defiance shots of this kind are, if anything at a high-art event, obedient.
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