At This Photography Festival, the Camera Points Below the Surface
Deep beneath the town hall in Arles, France, past some unassuming service counters and down several flights of narrow steps, the artist Sophie Calle has buried some things that she can’t bear to part with.
Her show, called “Neither Give Nor Throw Away,” is a standout exhibition at this year’s Rencontres d’Arles, an annual summer photography festival founded in 1970 that presents group and solo shows of new and old photographic works in museums, churches, repurposed storefronts and parks across this Provençal city of 52,000 residents.
This year’s edition of the Rencontres, which runs through Sept. 29, is titled “Beneath the Surface,” and Calle’s contribution takes place in a labyrinthine series of underground caverns bisected by long arched balustrades. The shadowy walkways and damp, moldy atmosphere are ideal for her project, in which she displays works from her storeroom that were damaged in a storm. Advised by restorers to destroy them, she decided instead to give them a subterranean afterlife. And so, the works are now “buried” in Arles, where they continue to decompose, but have not, at least, been forsaken.
Calle — a photographer, writer and conceptual artist — is one of France’s most lauded and prolific contemporary art makers. Family, absence, death, romance and archives are themes that recur in her work, which often pairs images and text. In Arles, water-damaged photographs show a charred and discarded bed, formerly Calle’s own, in which a man who was renting a room from Calle’s mother burned to death, and a series of modest grave plots with stark markers: Mother, Sister, Child.
Others come from a series titled “The Blind,” which matches modest black-and-white portraits that Calle took of blind people with her photographic interpretations of their responses, also present as framed texts, when she asked them what they imagine to be beautiful. (Answers include the sea, the color blue and Alan Delon.)
