Archive and multimedia

On July 4, the 47th time opened the festival “Photo meetings in Arle” -the main European photo being. More than 40 projects of the main program will be open to the public until the end of September. This year, key curatorial decisions are aimed at returning photography in the field of contemporary art, and archiving is one of the main trends.

From a single central topic that would connect all the projects of the main program, the Festival “Photo Meetings in Arle” refused a year ago. Having accepted the duties of the director in 2015, Sam Sturdze defeated the program into several thematic parts. The heading “after the war” is presented, on the one hand, an exhibition of the classic of military photography of Don McCallin , and on the other, by the conceptual project of Jan Morvan “Fields of the battles”, where the author meticulously catalogs the places of the main battles of mankind. Part of the program is entitled “Monsters and Company”, a separate section is devoted to Africa.

Sometimes the curatorial solution seems conditional: some projects could be transferred without loss of meaning to one of the neighboring headings. But from time to time, after the heading of a particular exhibition, the curatorial credo is visible. For example, a multimedia installation of Christian Marklei was attributed to Sturdze’s street photography - a series of videos collected from dozens of pictures of lens, and this immediately declared his attitude to the usual boundaries of the genre: formally, Marklei really shot on the street, but there are no people in his photographs, only the traces left by them are carefully collecting and cataloging.

Archival, as can be seen from the program of this year, generally becomes almost the main cross-hard basic program. As 10 years ago, every third explication spoke about the search for identity, so this year many projects were collected from archival material entirely or uses it to one degree or another. So, the section of the Festival “Monsters and the Company” is presented by the exhibition-research of the image of “Alien” in the cinema and the Danish documentary about UFO witnesses in the United States. At work with the sources, exhibitions of documentary programs were built - from the monumental work of Joao Pina in the footsteps of South American repressions to the painstaking project of Laia Abriel “History of the Misoginia. Part One. "

10 years ago, both the theme of the “stranger” and the projects about transgender and misoginia with a high degree of probability would be presented by projects where the photographer would become his own model. This year, almost none of the authors turns the lens on himself and their own life. Artists who work directly with the theme of their own identity this year is vanishing, but even they, for example, Katerina Jebb, also do this through a selection and a collection - images, documents or ephemeer . At the same time, it cannot be said that a personality disappears from the photograph. Along with those who create images, the figure of the one who collects and stores them is unexpectedly advanced: a separate program is dedicated to collectors, and we owe, for example, an exhibition of the photo archive of the Hara Kiri magazine, the forerunner of Charlie Ebdo, or a collection of photographs about Quir-culture.

Unlike the collector, for the artist, working with an archive remains just a technique, but it is significant that it is she who becomes the main from the approaches in the program “New approaches to documentary”. Perhaps such unidirectionality is explained simply by the curatorial choice of Sam Sturdze, who decided to sharply change the policy of his predecessors. The program has more video and multimedia, as well as the works of authors who do not relate themselves to photographers, as we would not call the photographer Andres Serrano - it is known for the most work “ Piss Christ” , and its new series of American portraits is exhibited at the festival this year. We can say that the curators reoriented the program from understanding the photograph as a medium to understanding the specific images that this medium carries.

Perhaps the work with archives allows you to take this step the least painful for the keepers of the forty -year -old traditions of the festival, worrying that the program has fewer traditional photo formats and too many multimedia installations. Another thing is that Sam Sturdze has excellent intuition, and behind his position, maybe there is a feeling of global change of interests in artistic life. In this case, in the coming years, we are waiting for a turn from individual to social, from uniqueness to pattern, and artists will systematize, describe and lay out the exorbitant visual archive on the shelves, which we have accumulated over the past two decades.