From A Natural Order by Lucas Foglia.
Each summer since 1970, tucked away in a beautiful French medieval town, the Recontes d’Arles exhibition has celebrated the life of photography. While it’s been a favorite stop on the photo festival circuit for editors and photographers in the past, this year’s exhibition was unrealized and, at best, disjointed.
What was missing most of all in this year’s exhibition was artists who take risk with the photographic medium. There was no work that was challenging, trendsetting or relatively innovative. A fault of curation, not the photographers themselves.
The lack of edginess and quality raises the question, can the old teach the new during these times of flux in the photographic field?
Despite the generally disappointing showing, however, there is still a handful of photographers we think you should check out.
Lucas Foglia’s work (above) concentrates on people who he says “are living off the grid” in the United States. His subjects are people who are living off the land for a variety of reasons from religion, politics or fear of what is to come. His photographs are intimate, sincere and curious. They recall a certain poetry similar to a classic Bob Dylan song. The work explores a way of life that could be considered hysterical, yet his images show an admiration for these people’s simple way of living.
Photo: Nelli Palomäki
Finnish photographer Nelli Palomäki’s work could be described as classic black and white portraiture. She strongly channels August Sanders and Disfarmer, or more recently Vanessa Winship. Her subjects are mostly children on the verge of adolescence. They are vulnerable but stoic figures who are looking directly at the lens. Their gaze so direct it almost feels that you have just witnessed survivors from a war.
Photo: Jaana Maijla
Jaana Maijala, also a Finnish photographer, creates abstract photographs that focus on an unknown abused surface. The artist begins by pressing her pencil to a white piece of paper repeatedly until the surfaces buckles and waves; by photographing these intense drawings the artist is preserving this distress. The images recall aerial photographs of a landscape, the face of simple rock or even a meteorite. It is the repetitive motion that causes this images to be both beautiful and afflicted.
This year’s Discovery Prize asked directors of famous photographic colleges and schools to nominate recent graduates from their institutions. The mission of the prize is to support an artist who has been “recently been discovered or deserves to be.” It was refreshing to actually find new discoveries in this year’s nominees, since in the past the artists have normally been famous to their native homeland. Last year the prize went to Magnum photographer Mikhael Subotzky and British artist Patrick Waterhouse. This year the artists had rarely been exhibited or published.
Photo: Jonathan Torgovnik
This year’s prize went to Getty photographer Jonathan Torgovnik from his intense series “Intended Consequences.” Torgovnik photographed women and their children who were conceived by rape during the 1994 Rwanda Genocide. The photographer announced during his acceptance speech that more than half the proceeds from the award, 25,000 euros, would be donated to an organization that supports these women and children.
Photo: Josef Koudelka
The only other two other exhibitions worth mentioning out of the over 40 shows are Josef Koudelka’s famous series, Gypsies, and Sophie Calle’s exhibition, Blind. Koudelka’s exhibition celebrates the reissuing of this well-known work first published in 1975. Both the book and the exhibition display 30 previously unseen photographs. These photographs hold onto the same heart and power as they did at first viewing.
Photo: Sophie Calle
Sophie Calle’s exhibition displays her recent series created in Istanbul. This work, as always, explores the artist’s fascination of staring into strangers’ lives. The theme focuses on her blind subjects’ tales of how they lost their sight and recollections of their last visions. The photographs are of the subject themselves, accompanied with text and at times there is a photograph which interrupts the subject’s last sight. The portraits are not highly aestheticized, as her work never is, but the stories are heartbreaking and therefore so is the work.
