ARLES Gallery


entioning the name of Arles, a quiet little spot on France's Cote d'Azur, usually evokes those fields of sunflowers so beloved of Vincent van Gogh, who lived and painted there. For professionals in photography, however, the town has acquired another meaning: It is the site of the annual Recontres Internationales de la Photographie, a month-long festival that for over two decades served as the European photography community's central meeting place. Though it is generally referred to by insiders as the "Arles festival," or simply "Arles," the R.I.P. (its name translates roughly as "international photography congress") more strongly evokes the carnival. Held each summer, it is a monumental undertaking - - a month of workshops, several dozen exhibits, and, at the beginning, an intensive week of afternoon panel discussions and evening audiovisual presentations. At its most energized and vital, the event serves as both a showcase and a marketplace for all kinds of photographic imagery and photography projects -- not a photo-industry trade show like VisComm in the States or PhotoKina in Koln, but rather photography's equivalent of the jazz or dance festival. next column		istorically, the programming at Arles -- the selection of the menu of shows, evening AV features, and workshops -- has had much more to do with cronyism, convenience, photo politics and chance than with intellectual inquiry, education, or other such motives. This approach, initiated by photographer Lucien Clergue -- a native Arlesian, one of the Rencontres' founders and for many years its artistic director - persisted virtually unchanged through the Rencontres' 25th anniversary festival of 1994. It created the sense of camaraderie, even of community, that pervaded the event: crowded into one small town, in an atmosphere one could describe as that of the working vacation, for one week in early July, there could be found a goodly international mix of aspirants and notables in the field one could describe broadly as creative photography. That was Clergue's most important contribution to the field -- the intuition that if you gave photographers and others professionally involved with the medium an inexpensive, low-key, atmospheric, continental watering hole where they could assemble to schmooze with each other, they'd come in sufficient numbers to reach critical mass. And they did. next page