At the Arles Photographic Meetings, images far from clichés
Mary Ellen Mark documents the human condition
From her first outing with a camera in the streets of Philadelphia, she had the spark. In 1963, the American Mary Ellen Mark, a student at the Annenberg School of Communication in Pennsylvania, decided to devote herself to photography and to highlight unknown people. In 1976, a second revelation, during her immersion in “Ward 81” of a psychiatric hospital in Oregon where patients go from the most delicate tenderness to the darkest anger: she will seek out shards of truth in those who escape the dictatorship of appearances. From orders from magazines such as Life Or Voguethe documentary filmmaker explores her subjects for months. She captures, in black and white, the mischievousness of twins in Belfast (Northern Ireland), the femininity of a weightlifter in an Indian circus, the weariness of homeless people on a Californian road… Her greatest work remains her series on “Tiny”, a street child from Seattle whom she followed for thirty-two years, from 1983 to her own death in 2015, from the excesses of adolescence to the anchoring of motherhood. By focusing on these intense beings, the portraitist explored the range of human emotions and painted a poignant picture of our condition. The Rencontres d’Arles are dedicating its first French retrospective to her.
Stéphane Duroy and the Forgotten of History
In 1956, at the age of 8, he heard a radio report on the entry of Russian tanks into Budapest, Hungary. That would be the spark. In 1970, Stéphane Duroy interrupted his law studies at the University of Nanterre and traveled, with one obsession: to capture the history in progress that sweeps away the most humble. Arles presents 60 snapshots in black and white and in extraordinary saturated colors: men in a car scrapyard in the deindustrialized Great Britain of 1983, two little girls with their shopping basket in the bloodless East Germany of 1990… The last series, on America in the 2000s, no longer has protagonists, but the traces of their dream: a house of their own, where they can start all over again. A fresco that challenges.
Miyako, Mika, Rinko and the others
A child, alone in a street, advances with determination. This image of freedom is part of the series that Miyako Ishiuchi produced in the 1970s in Yokosuka, a city in eastern Japan where she grew up and which housed an American base. She is one of the figures in the retrospective that the Archbishop’s Palace in Arles is dedicating to 25 Japanese photographers, from the 1950s to today. Long in the shadow of men, they have often developed works that sublimate their daily lives. From the 1990s, many have done so thanks to color, which had been underexploited until then. Flamboyant in Mika Ninagawa, with her self-portraits in nature, among the cherry trees. Or evanescent in Rinko Kawauchi, who immortalizes the light enveloping a spoon or making a drop of water iridescent. The nugget of the festival.
