The third phase in a cycle devoted to rediscovering the museum’s photographic department - starting with The Clergues of Arles in 2014 and Dare photography in 2015 – the exhibition Rencontres in Réattu reveals the intimate link between the museum and the Arles Rencontres.
Acting as a true custodian of the memory of the Rencontres, the museum has been receiving works from the festival for over 15 years, and they form a remarkable collection. Free from the constraints of having to preserve photographic heritage or represent the history of the medium, this collection is the reflects the choices made by festival directors and curators, but also the artists, who are free to select prints at the end of each festival.
With a direct relevance to art today, it reflects the range of areas explored by photography, from the documentary approach to the trend towards the highly visual.
Anchored in the historic collection but also constructed around the latest acquisitions, the exhibition prefigures the Musée Réattu of tomorrow, and the future of a photography collection in constant evolution. It celebrates the jubilant role played by the Rencontres submissions as “particle agitators” or agents of revelation, growing from a “Photographic Art Section” set up in 1965 inside a museum that set out to be a laboratory, and giving rise to all sorts of hybrids of photography, fine art and contemporary art.
Revolving around the portrait, the core theme in the Rencontres submissions, the works display the photographer’s vision of the artist-model relationship. Through their cross-references, they probe the missions assigned to photography: to identify, to recognise, to catalogue, to classify, to explore the meanderings of the body and the human mind.
Whether they represent groups or individuals, whether they’re by anonymous artists or well-known ones, each photograph on show testifies to its era and reflects the mixture of fascination and revulsion humans experience when faced with their own image. The result is an astonishing range of characters, freely brought together… yazukas, alien enthusiasts, cyclists, transgender people, natives of Arles, priests, nuns, pygmies, lovers, striking workers, tourists, gypsies, passers-by, soldiers, students and more besides.
