The Arles photo festival

The organizers of the Arles Photo Festival humbly state that the festival is "developing and each year reflects strands of contemporary creative output across the hugely diverse field of photography." And this year's show seemed to span the hugely diverse field of photography. The theme was "India". Works by Indian artists such as Dayanita Singh in her series "Go away closer" and Jeetin Sharma stood out as Indian shows not to miss. But, a lot of the work in the India Gallery/warehouse seemed to follow the curve of traditional and already existing postmodern photography trends, so there were fewer “aha” moments.
However, a nearby warehouse in Arles featured, the Danshanzi District of China and this is where a lot of energy was. Playing on the word "China", Huang Rui, a socially committed artist coined the phrase "chai-na" which means "demo here." He is the founder of Danshanzi District in North East Bejing, which is a center for open dialogue by artists to reflect on the rapid industrial and physical changes their community is undergoing. The works by Chinese artists such as Miao Xiao Chun and the Gao Brothers stay with me, probably for reasons of aesthetics and a shared sensibility to massive change in an urban landscape.
Miao Xiaochun created a seamless billboard sized panorama of a modern Chinese cityscape so detailed in every square inch of the photograph it was both exciting and scary. One could peer into hundreds of windows in a beehive like arrangement of the modern Chinese city-overwhelming in its repetition. Is this a gigapixel image that sees space better than our unaided eye? One could study it for days and still find surprises in each window. The Gao brothers in "Another World" produced a series of poetic and haunting images that incorporated "affectionate irony" in their studies of partially demolished buildings. The large color photographs included monochromatic grey buildings that were sliced open with vividly colored humans standing singly in each opening or space. The subjects' questioning expressions could be interpreted in many ways. The pictures reminded me to not forget the human beings amidst such extreme physical changes in a city. Coming from New Orleans, with our own brand of the Dashanzi District, jokingly referred to as the "Post-destructivist movement," I related to the complex anxieties that the artists in that part of China are trying to somehow reconcile. There were many more images in this series that were thought provoking- too many to mention here. Check them out!

Michel Varisco