France. Summer is full of festivals, photography in particular. However, their artistic line varies from one festival to another, and for the most important of them, in their programming. The 55th edition of the Rencontres d’Arles and the thirty exhibitions it offers are no exception to eclecticism. The retrospective “Mary Ellen Mark (1940-2015)” and the migratory crossing of Mexico led by the Spanish Cristina De Middel are some of the highlights, along with Japanese photography. This is the subject of four exhibitions, two of which are devoted to major figures, Ishiuchi Miyako and Uraguchi Kusukazu. And a panorama of the photographic practices of Japanese women from the 1950s to the present day provides an unprecedented exploration of its history under the title “Répliques. 11/03/2011”, a focus on twelve works produced following the Fukushima disaster. The Fondation Louis Roederer Discovery Prize, awarded this year to curator Audrey Illouz, offers an interesting selection of worried visions of the world with seven young photographers with distinct visual styles, including François Bellabas, Coline Jourdan and Marilou Poncin.
If the French scene still does not benefit from a monograph worthy of one of its great names, it shows a beautiful diversity with the exhibitions Stephen Dock, Nicolas Floc’h, Marine Lanier, Vasantha Yogananthan, Mustapha Azeroual, Laurent Montaron and Sophie Calle.
The program associated with the Rencontres d’Arles also offers insight into the work of Stéphane Duroy presented by the Association du Méjan at Croisière and the first retrospective of Jean-Claude Gautrand (1932-2019) at the Musée Réattu. At the Parc des Ateliers, Luma continues its exploration of the American scene: the career of Lee Friedlander is approached by the filmmaker Joel Coen.
La Gacilly Festival – Last week of soybean harvest on this 25,000 hectare farm in Brazil, owned by SLC Agricola, the country’s largest soybean producer with 600,000 hectares of plantations across the country, 2022.
© George Steinmetz
Lectoure, Blois, Daoulas
Some 400 km from Arles, in the Gers, a change of atmosphere with the Lectoure Photographic Summer. As usual, the program is tight: seven exhibitions this year under the theme of “Terra Nostra”. The following are gathered for this 35th edition: Elaine Ling (1946-2016), Juliette Agnel, Esmeralda Da Costa, Driss Aroussi, Thomas Mailaender, Kahn & Selesnick and six young Corsican visual photographers.
In Vichy (Allier), the Portrait(s) festival is offering, among other things, a retrospective “Nadav Kander” in the spaces of the city’s large thermal establishment. In Blois (Loir-et-Cher), the Promenades photographiques are celebrating their 20th edition with a collective exhibition outside on the theme of siesta and vacations and sixteen exhibitions covering a wide range of subjects, from Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) to the plants of Virginie Sueres and the horizons of Jean-François Spricigo.
In Sarthe, near Le Mans, the 12th photographic season of the royal abbey of Épau has chosen the theme of the living, through the portraits of seeds by Thierry Ardouin and the trees of Hien Lam Duc or Bernard Reignier, among others.
In Brittany, the 10th edition of Les Balades photographiques de Daoulas (Finistère) will be showing Françoise Huguier and Hans Silvester’s views of Japan in the abbey gardens and in the town, while the La Gacilly photo festival will be holding its 21st edition in this Morbihan village, with a focus on Australia through the eyes of its photographers Trent Parke, Bobbi Lockyer, Tamara Dean and Anne Zahalka. Also on the programme will be the Joel Meyerowitz retrospective, Gaël Turine’s images of the sacred forests of Benin and Sophie Zénon’s images of the coastal paths of Brittany. In Guilvinec, the L’Homme et la mer festival has taken the La Gacilly festival as a model, using the town’s streets as the setting for its programme, where this year Finbarr O’Reilly’s Irish fishermen and the nomadic and migrant fishermen encountered by Guillaume Holzer in Indonesia will cross paths.
Photographic summer of Lectoure – Sébastien Arrighi, Ora Series, 2019.
© Sébastien Arrighi / Adagp Paris 2024
Women expose themselves
In Normandy, in Houlgate (Calvados), the “Les femmes s’exposent” festival also takes up residence outside, in particular on the beach where reports by Delphine Blast on the emancipation of women in Africa and Sophie Bramly on the beginnings of breakdancing in New York in the 1980s are being shown.
Visa pour l’image, in Perpignan (Pyrénées-Orientales), continues to be the voice of the work of the photojournalism profession with, on the program of the 36th edition, a focus on Alfred Yaghobzadeh and his view of the turmoil of the world since the Iranian revolution in 1979, and on Anastasia Taylor-Lind, who immersed herself in the daily life of the inhabitants of Donbass. The attention paid to the situation in the West Bank by Sergey Ponomarev and to peripheral France by Pierre Faure delivers striking reports, conducted over time.
