From 19th October to 28th November, the "Month of Japan" organised by the Médiathèque d'Arles offers an introduction to Japanese culture through a series of thematic conferences, meetings with artists, film screenings and an exhibition of 19th-century photographs of Japan. The museum echoes this programme by proposing to discover the universe of Japanese photographers whose works feature in its collections: Eiichiro Sakata, former assistant to Richard Avedon, specialising in unusual portraits of artists, invited to the Rencontres d'Arles in 1975, who offered the museum three sets of his most bewitching series on the theme of the body; and finally, Keiichi Tahara, whose Windows series expresses so well the concept of "Ma", that emptiness which separates as much as it connects things...A way of putting the spotlight on Japanese photography, very early on associated by Lucien Clergue with the venture of the photography collection of the Musée Réattu and the Rencontres d'Arles festival.
