Les Rencontres d’Arles 2024
As the prestigious French photography festival, Les Rencontres d’Arles, embarks on its third week, we wanted to take a look at some of this year’s highlights.
Female photographers are a major presence in the line-up this year, with Mary Ellen Mark’s Encounters, Cristina De Middel’s Journey to the Centre, and a group exhibition of Japanese women photographers from the 1950s to now, titled, I’m so Happy You Are Here, being some of this year’s “blockbuster” exhibitions.
For The Art Newspaper, writer Alexander Morrison reviewed various displays across the city, such as Randa Mirza’s Beirutopia. He notes that this year’s exhibitions show us how new technologies, ideologies and ways of life require us to look afresh at the power of the image, reminding us that taking imagery at face value can pose real-life dangers.
Andrew Dickson for The Financial Times, gives a broader view of the festival amidst the French election. The second round of France’s parliamentary vote coincided with the end of the festival’s opening week. He reports that the city was covered in election signs and the space beneath one exhibition was even repurposed as a polling station. Yet, “despite this year’s Rencontres d’Arles festival featuring more than 40 exhibitions (several museum-scale)”, Dickson writes, “insights into the never-ending psychodrama of Macron-era politics were hard to find”. Instead, the festival looked to Beirut (Mirza), Trump’s America (Debi Cornwall) and Syria (Stephen Dock), among others.
