perspectives on photography
les rencontres d’arles and athens photo festival
It is photo festival season in Europe and one festival follows the next: From Belfast to Athens, Copenhagen to Arles, Cortona to Łódź, and many others. We visited two of them: Les Rencontres d’Arles and Athens Photo Festival.
The 55th edition of Les Rencontres d’Arles makes it one of the oldest and most important photo festivals worldwide, where photography lovers, makers and dealers meet, as they have since 1970, in the heat of the ancient charming town of Arles in Provence, France. Next to the abundance of exhibitions of the main program, Arles festival OFF, Luma Arles and an additional gallery program offer countless more, this year with a particular emphasis on the creativity of women photographers.
The festival is still open to the public until September 29.
Athens Photos Festival (APhF) has been a biennial festival since 1987 and is among the five oldest photo festivals in the world. The main exhibition is held at the Benaki Museum, curated by Manolis Moresopoulos, while several satellite exhibitions are shown around Athens. This year, APhF welcomed the public from June 6 – July 28.
The opening weeks of both festivals fell during a time of two major political events in Europe: in Athens, we learned the outcome of the European elections and the resulting rise of populist parties, and the opening week of Les Rencontres d’Arles started the day after the first round of the French elections, a week when many feared a political shift to the far right. Headlines about the upcoming elections in the US dominated the rest of the news.
One section of Athens Photo Festival main exhibition was designated to world politics: the rise of populism, activism, surveillance, upheaval, war…
Among the works were Brazilian photographer Rafael Roncato’s “Tropical Trauma Misery Tour," a critical view of network propaganda following the stabbing attack of Brazil’s Bolsonaro in 2018 (even more relevant after the assassination attempt on Trump in July this year), and Spanish artist Daniel Mayrit’s ironic project “One of Yours,” in which he takes on the role of a fictional candidate of a populist party. He presents a plausible, staged campaign including a life size tableau of himself, complete with balloons and campaign pamphlets next to his digitally manipulated images with international politicians and leaders as well as himself on the covers of prestigious news magazines and with this reveals the scheming methods of populism.
A highlight of Athens Photo Festival was the audio-visual installation “The Dead Govern the Living” by David Fathi and Frédéric D. Oberland. The installation included several screens in a seperate room showing multiple video clips of actual physical fighting in assemblies and senates around the world in slow motion with a soundtrack composed by Oberland. The title quotes Auguste Comte, for whom it was a reference “to the cumulative nature of positivism and the fact that our current world is shaped by the actions and discoveries of those who came before us." 150 years later, Fathi compares Auguste Comte’s idealism with current cynicism and questions if we are trapped in a never-ending circle.
When this work was shown at a prior festival, a journalist suspected these videos were AI-generated, a fake fact. More evidence that we have entered a post-truth era.
There were no projects that covered the two most mediated wars, Ukraine and Gaza, but there were plenty on war itself, its narrative and its documentation in both festivals.
Shortlisted for the Young Talents Dior prize in Arles, Polish photographer Natalia Kepesz’ series “Niewybuch” gives an insight into the world of military camps in Poland. Her images show kids and teens acting out roles usually confined to adult military, complete with fake blood, weapons and uniforms, which leaves us wondering if we are witnessing an actual military camp. Is this prescient of what is just around the corner coinciding with discussions in Europe about reinstating conscription and the inevitability of war?
Alexandra Rose Howland (APhF), Debi Cornwall, Stephen Dock and Randa Mirza (Les Rencontres d’Arles) take a different approach to war documentation.
Howland’s “Leave and Let Us Go” is a collaboration project that presents a portrait of Iraq. In an expansive collage across the gallery wall the artist merges her own photographs with images and videos from the cellphones of people she met across the country. As a result, the narrative becomes multi-dimensional and provides additional perspectives.
Beirutopia by Lebanese photographer Randa Mirza looks at post-war Beirut through seven projects, which are all shown at Les Rencontres d’Arles. In “The Sniper”, she takes on the role of a sniper and shoots people from a demolished building with her camera. The results are black-and-white slides projected on a badly damaged wall in the exhibition space. With “Parallel Universes” (2006) Mirza challenges us with her digitally manipulated images, in which she combines past and present, war time and leisure time, and questions the objective character of war photography.
With the two bodies of work that are presented in Arles, American Debi Cornwall continues her exploration of the outward image the US produces for itself. At first glance in the exhibition, the viewer is confused about the context of the works and so is invited to take a closer look.
For “Necessary Fictions” (2020) Cornwall visited ten US military bases and training camps with mock-village sets in a fictional war in a fictional country (“Atropia”) and its inhabitants, performed by American citizens with Iranian or Afghan origins, some of them war refugees, who often play a version of their own past.
Cornwall’s images have a surreal feel which helps remove the images from a straight photojournalistic appearance.
The images for “Model Citizens” (2024) were taken at the U.S. Border Patrol Academy, Donald Trump’s MAGA rallies and history museums where Americans are portrayed as heroic victors or innocent victims. Arranged next to each other, they raise questions about the notion of citizenship in a polarised and militarised culture. Cornwall is the winner of the prestigious Prix Elysée 2023. The jury emphasised that “the project, which is both a political and intellectual commitment, points to the urgency and necessity of questioning photography as a proof.”
1 - Randa Mirza. The Selective Residence, Beirutopia series, 2019. Courtesy of the artist / Tanit Gallery.
2 - Debi Cornwall, Smoke Bomb, Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, California, U.S., Necessary Fictions series, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.
This question is also raised by French photographer Stephen Dock, who has covered several wars as a photojournalist since 2011. Feeling frustrated and questioning the usefulness of his images, he started to edit and deconstruct them. The results, shown in his exhibition “Echoes” in Arles, are an attempt at reappropriating his own images and a refusal to continue to serve a particular narrative and feed the overconsumption of images. It is also an invitation to feel, to experiment, and go beneath the surface.
A grid of images from six different countries that Stephen Dock covered as a war photojournalist, is presented in one room. Images where nothing actually happened, detached from the conflict, invite us to question how our ideas of war are actually formed. A video screen with footage taken from the internet, mainly video propaganda and documentation from the Middle East, overwhelms the viewer and accentuates the idea of overconsumption of images and media. In another room, Dock displays his “washed” images, as he calls the repetitive process of photocopying of the originals. They have disappeared to a simple sum of pixels, erasing all evidence of proof. One of them, a piece of blurry, blood-red pixels, leaves the observer to his own imagination.
All of these four artists, Howland, Mirza, Cornwall and Dock, question how we consume images and how this influences our opinions and how these ideas then shape the collective consciousness.
1 - Stephen Dock, Lesbos 2015, Echoes series, 2011-2023. Courtesy of the artist.
2 - Installation view, Stephen Dock, Untitled I, 2023, Echoes series, 2011-23
While the discussion that photography cannot be proof of facts is nothing new, the previous decades of hyper-capitalism, geo-political changes and the influence of social media and “fake news” have made the debate more urgent and with the rise of AI, it is taken to another dimension.
Since our feature on AI in see-zeen #8 in spring 2023, it has embedded itself in our daily lives and debates have evolved from how to stop AI to the quintessential question of how to train and co-exist with AI.
In the panel discussion “Utopia/Dystopia” at Les Rencontres d’Arles with Stephen Dock, Debi Cornwall and Bruce Eesly, Dock emphasised that a simple photo is part of research, not proof, as there is not one story but several stories, which sometimes merge, but sometimes contradict each other.
Bruce Eesly, a German artist, working with AI, believes that photography on its own can no longer fulfill its function of what is happening in the world unless it is contextualised because of the flood of AI generated images we are already seeing. Eesly is one of the artists whose AI generated work has been exhibited at photo festivals. While we value the interesting approach of the projects we have seen, we are surprised they are displayed next to photographic works.
Remember the discussion about how AI generated images cannot be called photographs? We believe that transparency is one key to how we can re-learn to read visuals. When AI generated images are shown on the same level as photography, it can accentuate the confusion we already experience with digitally manipulated photography. We do join the request by Boris Eldagsen to either open a special section for AI generated works in future photo festivals or to create separate festivals.
Debi Cornwall, a former civil rights lawyer, proposes that “authorship” could redefine photojournalism. If institutions adopted a code of conduct of the kind of photography they will publish and in what circumstances, and if photographers and photojournalists established their credibility and transparency, she believes it could enable critical viewers to make their own judgements.
The exhibition “New Farmer” by German artist Bruce Eesly starts off like a documentary on the green revolution in the 1950s and 1960s: images of businessmen in suits bending over a table with potatoes, a man in a suit proudly presenting the perfect harvest crop or a table with classified vegetables. As the narrative progresses, the images become less believable and more absurd with images of giant vegetables: a tree-sized broccoli towers above houses, two farmers sitting on a giant pumpkin or a boy who proudly presents a giant fennel.
Eesly, a gardener himself, presents us with his AI-generated images in a humorous, but critical way about our relationship to nature and our desire to dominate nature. Inspired by the absurd images in documentations of the green revolution, and the roles of science and technology, Eesly used AI with the intention to engage in a discussion on technology using technology. He sees a similarity between agricultural and AI companies and how they benefit, both profiting from the collective research of the previous centuries
1 - Bruce Eesly. Peter Trimmel wins first prize for his UHY fennel at the Kooma Giants Show in Limburg, 1956, New Farmer series, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
2 - Maria Mavropoulou
3 - Sander Coers
At APhF, Maria Mavropoulou and Sander Coers raise concerns about rewriting history through their very personal AI-generated projects.
Mavropoulou added AI generated images to her family archive to fill the gap in the missing documentation due to displacement, loss and deprivation. For her, this process has had a therapeutic effect. Her series “Imagined Images” was presented with images and written prompts on printed wallpaper.
Like Mavropoulou, Coers also expands his family history with AI generated images and presents them together with archival photographs for the period of the 1940s–1990s, (re)constructing his grandparents’ past and his own heritage. With "Post,” he continues his work, on the perception of masculinity in visual culture and looks at how AI picks up the stereotypes through different eras.
Italian photographer Ludovica de Santis doesn’t employ AI, but compares her creative process for her project “Onironautica” to AI platforms such as Midjourney and OpenAI. Inspired by Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eden’s work on dreams, she recreates images coming from her unconscious mind, and uses “human intelligence” to create content. With a sense of humour she takes us into her lucid dreams.
Another “imaginary” project shown in APhF is Tiàwùk by Italian photographer Gabriele Cecconi. It is the story of an “economic fantasy”, a fictional planet with extreme environmental conditions, but rich in energy resources. The photos, taken in Kuwait (Tiàwùk in reverse), move between (science-)fiction and documentary and reveal a world in conflict between tradition and consumerism. His delightfully playful images show a world that feels both familiar and alien and raise questions about a near future scenario for all of us.
While there were plenty of other exhibitions and projects worth mentioning, we feel we are at a tipping point of human evolution and the impact the evolution is having on image creation. The discussion about the meaning of photography today, in particular documentary photography, and the truth we can find in them seemed most relevant to us. (You can find a selection of our highlights of both festivals here)
We hope that photo festivals and museums will continue as they serve as important platforms for artists to spark political and social debates through their work. But of course, to also give space to the works that help to disconnect us from reality with humour and beauty.
P.S. Being an online magazine and mostly seeing the work we publish on a monitor in digital form, we were thrilled to see the printed and installed work of some photographers we have featured in see-zeen, exhibited in the festivals:
Gloria Oyarzabal (see-zeen #12) and Masina Pinheiro & Gal Cipreste (see-zeen #11) at the main exhibition and Ashkan Sahihi (see-zeen #8) at the satellite exhibition “Imperfection” at Athens Photo Festival.
Elsa Gregersdotter (in our feature on Nordic photography in see-zeen #11) and Mathis Benestebe (see-zeen #10) at Les Rencontres d’Arles.
And Diego Moreno and Cristobal Ascencio (both in our feature on Latin American Photography in see-zeen #10) shown at both festivals.
List of exhibitions and projects mentioned in the article:
Les Rencontres d’Arles:
Beirutopia by Randa Mirza, winner of the Photo Folio Review 2023 at la Maison des Peintres.
Model Citizens by Debi Cornwall, curated by Nathalie Herschdorfer and Lydia Dorner at Espace Monoprix
Echoes by Stephen Dock, curated by Audrey Hoareau, at Croisière
New Farmer by Bruce Eesly at Croisière.
Niewybuch by Natalia Kepesz, shortlisted for the Dior Photography and Visual Arts Award for Young Talent at La Lampisterie at Luma Arles.
Athens Photo Festival:
Main exhibition curated by Manolis Moresopoulos at the Benaki Museum
Tropical Trauma Misery Tour by Rafael Roncato
One of Yours by Daniel Mayrit
The Dead Govern the Living by David Fathi and Frédéric D. Oberland
Leave and Let Us Go by Alexandra Rose Howland
Imagined Images by Maria Mavropoulou
Post by Sander Coers
Onironautica by Ludovica de Santis
Tiàwùk by Gabriele Cecconi