Les Rencontres d'Arles 2024: A Der Greif guide through the festival

Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles inaugurates its 55th edition at various venues across the city – and throughout the South of France – from 1 July to 29 September 2024. Der Greif guides you through the most exciting week for European photography and beyond to highlight our past and present collaborators’ works at the festival.

Our past Guest Room collaborator and C/O Berlin Foundation Director Sophia Greiff – together with Melissa Harris – presents “Encounters”, the first retrospective exhibition of American documentary photographer and portraitist Mary Ellen Mark. “Encounters” are five of her most in depth projects on institutionalized women in the Oregon State Hospital, street children in Seattle, as well as sex workers in Mumbai, the needy and dying in Mother Teresa’s charities and traveling circus families in India.

Curator and Director of Photo Elysée Nathalie Herschdorfer teamed up with Lydia Dorner to delve into documentary photographer Debi Cornwall’s work and investigate what are the stories power tells, and the games it plays to manage unsettling realities. The exhibition features two bodies of work, namely “Model Citizens” and “Necessary Fictions”, which vividly narrate US power’s performance, consumption and normalization.

Herschdorfer also presents “Sport In Focus”, an exhibition bringing together and unveiling the vast photographic collections of the Olympic Museum and the Photo Elysée museum in Lausanne. During major competitions, photographs are intended to draw attention to the athletes’ performances, still, as a consequence of the camera’s role in the mobilization of mass audiences amateur photography.

The festival also features Printed Matter Executive Director Lesley A. Martin’s curated exhibition “I’m So Happy You Were Here”, in collaboration with Takeuchi Mariko and Pauline Vermare. With a focus on material from the 1950s to now, the show presents over twenty-five artists from different Japanese generations. This collection of historical and contemporary works weaves together three major motifs – observations of everyday life that are both deep and delicate; critical perspectives on Japanese society, particularly on the roles inhabited – and often reinterpreted – by Japanese women; as well as experiments with and extensions of the photographic form.

Curator Holly Rousell (UCCA Center for Contemporary Art) is also one of our past collaborators who is present at Les Rencontres d’Arles with a curated show on Mo Yi, “Me In My Landscapes”, which represents the first major comprehensive museum study of early works from Chinese artist, Mo Yi (莫毅). An outsider, and auto-didact photographer, Mo Yi’s images from the streets are iconic for their ability to capture the energy and melancholy of China’s evolving social fabric during the second half of the 20th century.

The programme at Les Rencontres d’Arles also presents Urs Stahel’s, Curator and Consultant at Bologna-based Fondazione MAST, research “When Images Learn to Speak. Conceptualized Documentary Photography from Astrid Ullens De Schooten Whettnall’s Collection”: around 5,500 photographs by some 100 photographers, collected over the past 30 years by Astrid Ullens de Schooten Whettnall’s Collection. In the Curator’s words “[t]he foundation’s collection also testifies to another important truth: while it recognises that a single photograph can be beautiful, even great, it also knows that it says surprisingly little about the world”.