The Arles photography festival has been in transition for several years, looking forward to the medium’s exciting but uncertain post-digital future while also looking back at its past. This year, there are homages to veterans such as Don McCullin, Sid Grossman and Peter Mitchell, but much more work that questions the very idea of old-fashioned observation.
We live in an age where the emphasis is on process – image manipulation, performance, collage, archival appropriation – so it is perhaps unsurprising there is now a tendency towards elaborate over-curation. In this context, a group show entitled Nothing But Blue Skies is a lesson in the power of a single unifying subject ambitiously explored: the 9/11 attacks on the twin towers.
You can feel the impact of that cataclysmic event the moment you enter the first room, which Hans Peter Feldman has filled with newspaper front pages in which the burning towers were juxtaposed with hysterical headlines:“World under attack.” The image of the buildings ablaze recurs throughout, whether in Mounir Fatmi’s black sculpture of the Manhattan skyline made from VHS cassettes, or Gerhard Richter’s blurred digital print that could have been photographed though the ash-smeared window of a nearby building.
But the most haunting piece is Michael Kowalski’s installation Just Like the Movies, which mirrors the actual event and its aftermath by deftly weaving clips from Hollywood movies such as Die Hard, Wall Street and Independence Day into a single seamless visual narrative. It has a chilling, dreamlike resonance, both an evocation and prefiguring of the attacks.
One of the themes of this year’s festival is street photography, then and now. Irish photographer Eamonn Doyle creates a buzz with an installation that uses sound, drawing and design to emphasise the looming presence of his powerfully up-close and intimate photographs of Dublin people going about their daily business. Here, with every wall filled with images, some toweringly big, some gathered in grids, it is as if Doyle and his collaborators have created their own Dublin of the imagination – one the viewer has to negotiate from various different and often surprising perspectives, as if visiting a strange city for the first time.
The street similarly dominates the work of Ethan Levitas, a New Yorker whose recent work is also haunted by 9/11 and its aftermath. Curator Joshua Chuang chooses to contrast Levitas’s contemporary take on Manhattan with that of the pioneering street photographer Garry Winogrand, an approach that just about works while not really doing the younger artist any favours. His two series – one of people lost in thought at the site of the twin towers, the other in which he points his camera at city cops, who often return his gaze with fierce intent – are much more self-consciously alert about the act of looking than Winogrand’s more compulsive urge to find the surprising in the everyday. Pairing Doyle with Winogrand might have made for a more revealing dialogue.
Elsewhere, moving images loom large in two ambitious shows. Scary Monsters looks at how giants, cyclopses, vampires, zombies, mythical creatures and aliens have long reflected our collective fears and fantasies on film, though there is something too kitsch about the collection, which undercuts any deep Freudian analysis of the same. More rigorous and revealing is the provocatively titled Tear My Bra, in which Azu Nwagbogu, curator of the Lagos photo festival, illustrates the subtle ways in which Nollywood, the booming Nigerian film industry, has impacted on visual storytelling in Africa, in the work of photographers such as Omar Victor Diop and Karl Ohiri.
Kenyan-based Sarah Waiswa won the Discovery award for her series, Stranger in a Familiar Land, which looks at the persecution of albinos in sub-Saharan Africa. It is a dreamlike take on a harsh subject with a single female model posed against the bright skies and rubbish-strewn Kibera slums. A brave attempt to move outside a traditional documentary but one that, for me, seemed oddly over-staged.
Laia Abril’s dark and moving show, A History of Misogyny Chapter One: Abortion, mixes found images, implements, text and personal testimony to explore the dangers that women still face in many countries though lack of access to legal and safe abortion clinics. The sense of stillness in the space was testimony to its quietly angry power and Abril deservedly won the festival’s inaugural Laureate award.
• Les Rencontres de la Photographie is in Arles, France, until 25 September.
