Highlights from Rencontres d’Arles 2024, the world’s premier photo festival

Every summer since 1970, the photography world has turned its gaze to the south of France for Les Rencontres d’Arles. The major photography festival, which annually takes over the ancient city of Arles, draws some of the world’s most acclaimed images-makers while making space for emerging talent and shining a light on photographers of the recent past who’s work demands to be revisited. Among its quaint streets and the monumental remnants of its Roman past, the festival inhabits venues across the whole of Arles – from its many dedicated gallery spaces to churches and ancient crypts to vacant comercial properties and even the local Monoprix supermarché.

Running until September 29, this year’s programme takes inspiration from the idea ‘beneath the surface’ with the all the “tremors and turmoil, spirits, traces, parallel readings and rereadings” suggested by the theme. One of the festivals headline exhibitions which responds most literally to this concept is Sophie Calle’s Neither Give Nor Throw Away. The show features Calle’s series The Blind – a body of work she had created for a previous exhibition before her storeoom was damaged by a storm and mold spores infiltrated the space. Now on display in the city’s cryptoporticus – a dank subterranean venue where the stone walls drip with moisture and the ground is saturated, treachorous clay – Calle intends to let the work decompose. “I decided that I would bury my Blind there, allowing them to continue disintegrating, so that their words, which speak of nothing but beauty, could seep into the city’s foundations,” she writes in her introduction (alongside a handwritten aside by the artist warning visitors that should they decide to “borrow” any of the work on display, it will release toxic mold spores into their homes).

Another major name among the artists in this year’s exhibition is acclaimed US documentary photographer, Mary Ellen Mark. Encounters at Espace Van Gogh brings together images from five of her most beloved series. Known for her empathetic, humanist depictions of society’s most marginalised and vulnerable, Mark’s portraits are characterised by compassion, humour, and a boundless curiosity. The projects shown here feature her indepth studies of institutionalised women in psychiatric care, Seattle street kids, feminist protestors, sex workers in Mumbai and travelling circus families. Alongside some of the most recognisable of her images visitors can see contact sheets, correspondence and other archival materials that an extra depth and knowledge to our understanding of this great photographer’s legacy.

Elsewhere, in Salle Henri-Comte, Ishiuchi Miyako’s series Belongings is a compelling close study of other people’s personal effects. From possessions with nostalgic and sentimental significance (such as her mother’s lipstick) to items of more macabre fascination, such as a pair of gloves owned by a victim of the Hiroshima bomb, or a bodice worn by Frida Kahlo with an in-built spinal corset to support her injured back. In a statement about the series, the Japanes photographer explained: “All that has form will eventually vanish. Once the human body is lifeless, it cannot continue to exist in this world. This is an obvious fact, yet I sometimes find it impossible to accept. This was the case with my mother’s death, even though it is only natural for a parent to die before their child. Her body was nowhere to be found. The belongings she left behind, which once adhered to her, had become useless without their owner. Before disposing of them, I decided to take photographs.” In this sense, it is a series of images about absence. The shape of the gloves or the impressions on the lipstick becoming a template with which to trace the contours of their owner’s absence.

Vampires Fear No Looking Glass at L'église des Trinitaires is a group show presenting work by El Grupo de Cali, a community of creatives active during the 1970s and 80s in Cali, Colombia. Across many mediums, the works by ‘Caliwood’ artists on display explore potent themes such as coming-of-age amid drug cartells, vampirism and ideas of the ‘tropical goth’ (“a dark, skeptical, cynical, even monstrous perspective on life”), and voyeurism.

Just outside the historic centre of the city, the Monoprix is the home for the Discovery Award exhibition. Following the festival signage through the supermarché’s fresh produce and chilled aisles until encountering what appears to be an unauspicious goods entrance and making one’s way up a concrete stairwell, visitor’s emerge in a huge industrial space occupied by the prestigious award’s finalists. Among the artists included in the show are François Bellabas, whose project An Electronic Legacy takes the devastating firestorms which swept California in 2016 as a starting point for an ambitious and apocalyptic project using AI, ChatGPT and Midjourney.

Tshepiso Mazibuko’s Ho Tshepa Ntsheped Ya Bontshepe [to Believe In Something That Will Never Happen]. Born in the township of Thokoza, 30 kilometres south-east of Johannesburg, Mazibuko photographs her community and particularly the ‘born free’ generation of Black South Africans – the first generation to have never lived under Apartheid. Her portraits explore generational trauma and ask questions about the nature of the phrase “born free” some three decades after the official end of Aparteid.

Other photographers to look out for among the finalists include Nanténé Traoré, whose L’inquiétude poetically evokes the feeling of those “in between moments” – sometimes charged with suspense, sometimes with ennui. And Liquid Love Is Full Of Ghosts by Marilou Poncin – which envisions a future in which our sexual desires and augmented and fulfilled by technology. 

Take a look in the gallery above for a closer look at these exhibitions and other work on display. Les Rencontres d’Arles is running until September 29, 2024.