Arles Photography Festival review: Who needs big names when you have cute animals and alien abductions? | Photography

HeyOn June 16, 1963, an Albuquerque mechanic named Paul Villa was allegedly invited – via telepathic messages from an alien crew – to photograph their spaceship. The result was an image of a flying object in the sky. Villa’s account is similar to that of the Swiss man, Billy Mayer, who saw his first flying saucer when he was five years old, and has taken more than 1,400 photos of them since then. One of Meyer’s flying saucer photographs appears in the famous poster hanging in Fox Mulder’s office in The X-Files. The following words were added to Mayer’s photo: I want to believe.

We’re not alone: ​​Strange photographs are one of the highlights of this year’s Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, the world’s most famous photography festival. The show draws on dozens of examples from private and public archives that provide visual “documentation” of UFOs, unexplained phenomena, and close encounters with aliens. Most of the photos were taken between the 1960s and 1980s, when reports of UFO sightings were at their peak – and in the United States, the place with the highest number of UFO sightings in the last century. Naturally, all the images turn out to be the result of crude tricks (hanging a dish on a string in front of the camera), misidentifications or freak accidents of analogue film. They may be amateurish and fake, but they still attract you with their distinctive and fascinating storytelling.

A film adaptation of Ray Santelli’s 1995 pseudo-documentary Alien Autopsy, which consists of highly questionable black-and-white footage purporting to show the gruesome dissection of the alien Roswell found in New Mexico in the 1940s, has hit international news channels – more than a decade after the release of the ET film. But in the film, the journalist who broadcast the footage on French television seemed genuinely disturbed by the autopsy, and said at the time that it didn’t even occur to him that it might be fake. The disturbing truth this exhibition reveals is that, if the desire to believe is strong enough, an image can convince us of anything.

“We Are Not Alone” proves once again that some of the best performances in Arles are by unknown amateurs and photographers. This 57th edition feels more fun and whimsical, with fewer large-scale shows by major living artists (there are modest-sized shows by William Klein and Edward Steichen). In La Croisiere, Ivorian photographer Paul Cudjoe, who died in 2021, gets his first major solo exhibition in France – the result of more than 15 years of conservation work with an archive of thousands of negatives.

Cudjoe had a studio in Abidjan and photographed the city’s dance halls and fashions, but he was also one of the first African photographers to create “graphic novels.” At the heart of this show is a series of theatrical scenes of seduction, romance and subterfuge, filmed in the 1960s and 1970s, produced and printed in the weekly Sunday newspaper. They are graphic television series that are shown on sofas in living rooms with titles like Lost and Found. Their loose sexual tensions, edgy style and suggestion of scandalous behavior give a sense of the culture and social attitudes of Abidjan at an economically and culturally prosperous time for the nation.

At the Méchanique Generale in Luma Arles, an animal model stumbles and runs through 200 years of animal photography. It could have been corny, but it’s cleverly curated, divided into sections that explore everything from 19th-century nature to TikTok videos of animals doing cute and funny things. It provides a new entry point for serious artists including Elliot Erwitt, Andreas Gursky, Ronnie Horn and Hiroshi Sugimoto, with enough range of styles, styles, singles and series to keep the pace going.

You can wander through masterpieces like Masahisa Fukase’s “Crows,” the Japanese photographer’s turbulent, obsessive series about the symbolic bird and his struggle with mental illness, to the photographs of Polish biologist Simona Kosak, who lived in a hut deep in the Białowieża Forest with a lynx and a wild boar, for three decades. There are moments of sadness, violence and pure joy. There are also a lot of pictures of cats. Is it populist? certainly. But it’s kind of irresistible.

The exhibition’s themes of coexistence and rethinking human interactions with nature fit in with several new exhibitions running concurrently at Loma, including Verena Barravel’s Delta, a film that challenges the human way of seeing the world using different camera and sound technologies, revealing sounds normally inaudible to humans – the clicking of crustaceans, the calls of underwater frogs, and the audible and visual scraping of reeds on par with our own noise.

Meanwhile, Sudat Ismayilova’s new exhibition, Amanat, Sacred Forest, is another poetic and playful showcase by the Uzbek artist. Her films, sculptures and photographs intertwine ancient folklore and landscape. The 2017 film The Haunted is Ismailova’s love letter to the spirit of the now-extinct Turan tiger, a symbol of Central Asia. She has collected memories, stories and dreams, and here weaves them together into a visual poem of devastating beauty.

The show revolves around three new films filmed in one of the largest walnut forests in the world, Arslanbob, southern Kyrgyzstan. Known as the Healing Forest, it was named after a 12th century Sufi. Locals believe that forest nuts cause hallucinations. It is a place with a rich ecosystem steeped in folklore and spirituality – qualities that become evident in the majestic shots of a waterfall filmed in Arslanbob in different seasons; People come to perform rituals and venerate the waters of this sacred site. When it is displayed on a massive scale, we too are transformed into worshipers who look up in awe, dwarfed by the power and awe-inspiring beauty of the waterfall. The landscape changes with the seasons, but the sound of water remains present throughout the film, giving voice to nature’s resistance.

There is also mysticism and magic in Ming Smith’s photographs. Wandering Light in the historic Sainte-Anne Church is the 80-year-old American artist’s first solo show in France, although she has worked extensively in Paris. Here, her connections to Impressionist painting are evident in her soft, indistinct gaze – although they might have been more apparent if the quality of the prints shown here had been a little more attentive.

Smith is drawn to jazz, to things that don’t stop or won’t stop, and she conveys that through the way she photographs people, not trying to fix them in space but trying to capture their energy – her 1978 photograph of Sun Ra is a masterpiece. Smudged, fluid and loose, the shapes in these black and white images seem to vibrate and shimmer, refusing to be reduced to a single form. And every time you go back to them, you see something new. Her use of black and white is reminiscent of Goethe: “Black belongs to the elements of things as they undergo a transformation in their nature.”

Sometimes the display is so beautiful that it can be painful to look at – but beauty and pain often coexist, as in Martin Barratt’s The Amazing Spirit of the City. The Algerian-born, French-raised photographer, 93, moved to New York in 1968 to pursue a career as a dancer — but when an injury cut short her, she began making videos and photographs. In the 1970s, she began working closely with two notorious gangs in the South Bronx – the Roman Kings and the Ghetto Brotherhood. The film she made about them, You Do the Crime, You Do the Time, attracted thousands to the Whitney Museum when it was shown there in 1978, but they are little known in Europe.

Barratt’s films, including her intimate portrait of gang leader Vicki, are shown alongside her photographs of people in the South Bronx, Brooklyn, and Harlem. Her simple compositions are created with such tenderness and emotion, whether she is a six-year-old boxer wrapping his hands before training or a smartly dressed gang leader looking out over the ruins of the Bronx on the day of his release from prison. Bharat truly sees people, and her sense of appreciation for them runs deep. As she says: “In places of violence I find love.” This is the great gift you are giving with this offer. Her photographs are at least as striking as those of Bruce Davidson, Daoud Bey, or even Roy DeCarava’s photographs of postwar Brooklyn. I staggered away surprised.

While there are a lot of pointless group shows relying on large photo collages this year, and some celebrity misses (the performances by Patti Smith and Charlotte Gainsbourg are rubbish), the UFOs, animals, magical forests and effervescent impressions of interconnectedness between species establish a beautiful, synchronized harmony. where an amateur space shooter rubs shoulders with Klein; As negligent masters are exposed, and a viral TikTok panda can seem as important as the creator of the world’s most expensive photo, the festival continues to challenge hierarchies and ideas about what makes a photograph valuable in our time.