Traveling showmen, the mentally ill, drug addicts, prostitutes: photographer Mary Ellen Mark (1940–2015) devoted most of her career to capturing lives on the margins of society. With Encounters (Espace Van Gogh), the 55th edition of Les Rencontres d’Arles honors this iconic figure of documentary photography by presenting the world’s first retrospective of her work.
On display are five seminal projects: street children in Seattle, sex workers in Mumbai, the needy under the care of Mother Teresa’s charities, institutionalized women at Oregon State Hospital, and traveling circus families in India. “Rare archives, including contact sheets, personal notes, and official correspondence, provide insight into the genesis of these long-term series,” explain the exhibition’s curators, Sophia Greiff and Melissa Harris. A successor to postwar humanist photography and embodying an aesthetic of empathy, Mary Ellen Mark sought to reveal what connects people, even those marked by marginality.
The Chinese artist Mo Yi has also frequently grappled with the question of marginality, capturing images low to the ground on a tripod, detached from the photographer’s gaze. This self-taught artist has continuously experimented with radical forms that distance the author’s subjectivity, creating a clear break from the practices of his contemporaries. “Manège fantôme [La Mécanique Générale] showcases Mo Yi’s images of his city’s streets at the turn of the twenty-first century, reflecting his desire to document a society undergoing profound transformation from an unconventional perspective,” explains Holly Roussell, the exhibition’s curator.
Marginality first stems from his childhood, spent in an isolated Tibetan diaspora community. Mo Yi bought his first camera in the early 1980s, just as China was opening up internationally. “His early works were quickly deemed strange and overly pessimistic, leading him to question his perspective, his gaze,” says Roussell. “Mo Yi then made a radical shift: he decided to place the camera on his neck, his arm, and use a remote shutter release.”
In questioning whether photography can exist without direct vision, this conceptual artist invents new grammars for apprehending, archiving, and documenting the world. “Mo Yi produces obsessively, and his images often need to be viewed collectively to grasp their essence,” Roussell explains. “The series I Am a Stray Dog, for example, captures the viewpoint of an invisible animal, relegated to the margins and frightened by the surrounding hustle and bustle. This method also provides insight into the evolution of fashion and human behavior from a different, ground-level perspective.” In his constant quest for understanding, Mo Yi documents without appropriating, immortalizing the sometimes-brutal changes in the urban fabric and the way bodies navigate within it.
Other artists in this edition of the Rencontres d’Arles explore the concept of the margin not through angle or subject, but by questioning the medium of the image itself. In Finir en beauté, artist Sophie Calle presents some of her photographs, degraded by time and mold, and chooses to exhibit them in the city’s cryptoportiques, the vast underground passages beneath the Place du Forum. “Last year, the humidity there insidiously attacked the photographs on display, and the fungus won out,” Calle explains. “The place that was supposed to protect them paradoxically acted as a tool of destruction. It’s ironic that this happened in a city that plays a major role in the preservation of images.”
As is often the case with this photographer, video and visual artist, this project is part of a broad network of echoes, a single thread in a web of references and connections. While preparing her À toi de faire, ma mignonne exhibition at the Musée Picasso, she discovered that her Les Aveugles series had been infiltrated by mold following a storm and had to be destroyed to prevent contamination of other works. “In the urgency of the situation, I decided to stage their absence […] and imagined that I could bury my blind men in the cryptoportiques, so that they would finish decomposing, while their words, which speak only of beauty, would sink into the foundations of the city.”
Her approach resonates with others. “By exploring mold and the underground, Sophie Calle’s work raises questions about the transformation brought about by vandalism, which fits perfectly with our approach,” says Hugo Vitrani, curator of the Au nom du nom exhibition. His aim is twofold: to tell both a history of graffiti through photography and a history of recent photography through the prism of graffiti. “Because the two echo each other,” he explains. “Graffiti isn’t just an aesthetic product; it’s something more subtle, akin to emotion and attitude, which forges a different relationship with the city, the law, and the margins.”
To capture the full complexity of what is simultaneously seen as an act of protest, a way of life, and an artistic gesture, the exhibition presents various documents: documentary photography, photojournalism, amateur photography, and police photography. It also features works by historical artists from this scene, such as Gusmano Cesaretti, who documented the Chicano community in Los Angeles in the 1970s, resulting in his book Street Writer, and Jamel Shabazz, who worked closely with the African American community in Brooklyn before it was devastated by the arrival of crack cocaine.
In 1981, portraits of Bronx residents by Sophie Calle were found tagged just as she was preparing for an exhibition opening in New York. The artist chose to display them as they were—and over forty years later, they have resurfaced again, this time in Arles. The circle is complete.
Les Rencontres d’Arles festival is on view until September 29, 2024 in Arles, France. More information on their website.
