Arles photography festival review: who needs big names when you’ve got cute animals and alien abductions?
On 16 June 1963, a mechanic from Albuquerque named Paul Villa was invited – via telepathic messages from an alien crew – to photograph their spaceship. The result was an image of the flying object in the sky. Villa’s account is similar to that of a Swiss man, Billy Meier, who saw his first flying saucer aged five, and has taken more than 1,400 photographs of them since. One of Meier’s flying saucer photographs features in the famous poster that hangs in Fox Mulder’s office in the X-Files. Added to Meier’s image are the words: I Want to Believe.
We Are Not Alone: Alien Images is one of the standout shows of Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles this year, the world’s most prestigious photography festival. The show draws on dozens of examples from private and public archives that present visual “documents” of UFOs, unexplained phenomena and close encounters with aliens. Most of the photographs were made between the 1960s and 1980s when reports of UFO sightings were at a peak – and in the US, the place that boasted the highest number of UFO sightings in the last century. Of course, all of the pictures turn out to be the result of rudimentary tricks (dangling a dish on a string in front of the camera), cases of misidentification or uncanny accidents of the analogue film. They might be amateur and faked, but they still pull you in thanks to their fascinating, idiosyncratic storytelling.
A film about the 1995 Ray Santilli pseudo-documentary Alien Autopsy, consisting of highly dubious black and white footage purporting to show the gruesome dissection of the Roswell alien found in New Mexico in the 1940s, made it on to international news channels – more than a decade after the release of ET. But in the film, the journalist who broadcast the footage on French TV seems still genuinely disturbed by the dissection, and said at the time it didn’t even cross his mind it could be fake. The unsettling truth this exhibition reveals is that if the desire to believe is strong enough, an image can convince us of anything.
We Are Not Alone proves once again that some of the best shows in Arles are by amateurs and unknown photographers. This 57th edition seems more playful and quirky, with fewer big shows by major living artists (there are modest-sized shows by William Klein and Edward Steichen). At La Crosière, the Ivorian photographer Paul Kodjo, who died in 2021, gets a first major solo exhibition in France – the result of more than 15 years of preservation work with an archive comprising thousands of negatives.
Kodjo had a studio in Abidjan and photographed the city’s dance halls and fashion, but he was also one of the first African photographers to create “photo novels”. At the centre of this show is a series of the theatrically staged scenes of seduction, romance and subterfuge, shot in the 1960s and 1970s, made for and printed in the weekly Sunday paper. They are photographic soap operas that unfold on sofas in living rooms with titles such as Lost and Found. Their loose sexual tensions, sharp style and suggestions of louche behaviour give a sense of the culture and social attitudes in Abidjan at an economically and culturally prosperous time for the nation.
At Méchanique Generale at Luma Arles, Animal Model stomps and gallops through 200 years of animal photography. It could have been corny, but it’s cleverly curated, divided into sections exploring everything from 19th-century naturalism to TikTok videos of animals doing cute and funny stuff. It gives a new entry point to serious artists including Elliot Erwitt, Andreas Gursky, Roni Horn and Hiroshi Sugimoto, with enough range of styles, approaches, single images and series to keep the pace lively.
You can wander from masterpieces such as Masahisa Fukase’s Ravens, the Japanese photographer’s angsty and obsessive series about the symbolic bird and his own struggles with mental illness, to photographs of the Polish biologist Simona Kossak who lived in a hut in the depths of the Białowieża Forest with a lynx and a wild boar, for three decades. There are moments of sadness, violence, and pure joy. There are also a lot of photographs of cats. Is it populist? Sure. But it’s kind of irresistible.
The show’s themes of coexistence and rethinking human interactions with nature dovetails into several of the new exhibitions showing concurrently at Luma, including Verena Paravel’s Delta, a film that challenges the human way of seeing the world by using different camera and sound techniques, revealing sounds usually inaudible to humans – the clicking of crustaceans, the underwater calls of frogs, the friction of reeds audible and visible on an equal footing with our own noise.
Meanwhile Saodat Ismailova’s new exhibition, Amanat, The Sacred Forest is another poetic and absorbing show by the Uzbek artist. Her films, sculptures and photographs intertwine ancient folklore with landscapes. The 2017 film The Haunted is Ismailova’s love letter to the soul of the now extinct Turan tiger, an icon of Central Asia. She collected memories, stories and dreams, weaving them together here into a visual poem of devastating beauty.
The show centres around three new films shot in one of the world’s largest walnut forests, Arslanbob, southern Kyrgyzstan. Known as the healing forest, it is named after a 12th-century mystic; locals believe the nuts of the forest are hallucinogenic. It’s a place with a rich ecosystem steeped in folklore and spirituality – qualities that become obvious in majestic footage of a waterfall filmed in Arslanbob in different seasons; people arrive to perform rituals, and venerate the water of this sacred site. Projected at an enormous scale, we too are made into worshippers who look up in awe, dwarfed by the waterfall’s might and staggering beauty. The landscape changes with the seasons, but the sound of water remains present throughout the film, giving nature’s resistance a voice.
There’s also mysticism and magic in the photographs of Ming Smith. Wandering Light at the historic Saint Anne church is the 80 year-old American artist’s first solo show in France, though she frequently worked in Paris. Here, her affinities with impressionist painting in her soft, blurred gaze become evident – though they could have been even clearer if the quality of the prints shown here was a little more attentive.
Smith is drawn to jazz, to things that don’t or won’t stand still, and conveys this in the way she photographs people, not trying to fix them in space but catch their energy – her 1978 photograph of Sun Ra is a masterpiece. The figures in these smudgy, liquid, loose black and white pictures seem to vibrate and scintillate, refusing to be reduced to a single shape. Each time you return to them, you see something new. Her use of black and white recalls Goethe: “Black belongs to the elements of things while they are undergoing a transformation of their nature.”
Sometimes a show is so beautiful it is almost painful to look at – but beauty and pain often coexist, as in Martine Barrat’s breathtaking Soul of the City. The Algerian-born, French-raised photographer, who is 93, moved to New York in 1968 to pursue her career as a dancer – but when an injury cut that short, she started to shoot videos and photographs. In the 1970s, she started to work closely with two notorious South Bronx gangs – the Roman Kings and the Ghetto Brothers. The film she made about them, called You Do the Crime, You Do the Time, drew thousands to the Whitney when it screened there in 1978, but she is little known in Europe.
Barrat’s films, including her intimate portrait of the female gang leader Vickie, are shown alongside her portraits of people in the South Bronx, Brooklyn and Harlem. Her minimal compositions are composed with such delicacy and soulfulness, whether it’s a six-year-old boxer wrapping his hands before training or a neatly dressed gang leader looking out at the rubble of the Bronx on the day he’s released from prison. Barrat truly sees people, and her sense of appreciation for them runs deep. As she says, “It is in places of violence that I find love.” That is the great gift she imparts with this show. Her portraits at least as arresting as those of Bruce Davidson, Dawoud Bey or even Roy DeCarava’s images of postwar Brooklyn. I stagger away amazed.
While there are too many stale group shows based on big photography collections this year, and some celebrity misfires (the shows by Patti Smith and Charlotte Gainsbourg are nonsense) UFOs, animals, magical forests and effervescent impressions of the interconnectedness of species establish a beautiful, synchronous harmony. Where an amateur alien prank picure-taker rubs shoulders with Klein; when neglected masters are uncovered and a viral panda TikTok can seem as important as the creator of world’s most expensive photograph, the festival continues to challenge hierarchies and ideas of what makes a valuable photograph for our times.