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Rencontres d'Arles:
Photographic Impressions

By Christian Lacroix, guest curator of the Rencontres d’Arles 2008.

She is in a long thick overcoat of smooth russet wool, with a short curly perm and a large red mouth. He is slim and pale, pipe in mouth and ash blonde hair swept by the Rhône-side wind. These are my parents. They are laughing because I am awkwardly holding the Kodak box. I was three or four, I remember the moment. In these first two photos, my father is out of focus and elsewhere, eyes half-closed and smiling; my mother keeps only a quarter face, in the bottom left corner, and giggles, motionless. My eye today, perverse or sophisticated, is not repelled by these clichés in either sense – shots, clichés – and especially not by the botched ones, to which I am tempted to ascribe a particular poetry. Thinking of them, I say to myself that what I did there was to make the perfect, apposite portrait of my parents: an adorable, distant, retiring father and an uptight mother who, though self-effacing, likes to amuse and have fun.

In biscuit tins and in sumptuous age-old chocolate boxes with hand-painted silk, the photos of my two families piled up without category or chronology. Tiny views in thick, notched white frames, already washed-out slides, sepia medallions on postcards, photos in small indented formats, studio portraits, unknown children on bear and goat skins, gormless or improbable wedding couples and fervent, slick-haired com­mu­- nicants, coagulating in a merry jumble.

As a child, hiding/curled in a still-maternal cocoon, I began to collect/consider the world from this protective bubble, where newspapers, magazines and all kinds of solar images opened my eyes wider than all the illustrations in my boys’ books.

The die was cast. For a long time, the photographic image was my only link with the world at large. My eye, retina and pupil were camera, lens and diaphragm. I contemplated passively, granted, but inside I was so reactive in my observations, imprinting confusions forever on my imagination-mind: photos = life, photos = painting, nature = photos, skin = photosensitivity, history and geography = photos, family = photos, politics = photos, everyday life = photos…

I would sit quite still, eyes straining at the silver paper, and tunnel into it in self-hypnotising spirals, striving to pass through the looking-glass à la Lewis Carroll. I wanted to cut loose from the drab routine on offer and taste real life in this sepia and black-and-white of uneven quality. What was then still called newsprint grain (and not yet pixels), whether or not crudely retouched, gave me even more boltholes, other fantasised images of corrupted surrealness.

It seems to me that photography and I were teenagers together: the explosion of pop, the kinetic experiments, the affirmation of sensitivity/sexuality, awakening political awareness and the rediscovery of the great masters of the ’20s and ’30s.

Once an adult, I felt myself gradually acquire some colour, step out of the frame and into the world and add third, fourth and fifth dimensions to the hologram-images, videos and installations – an entire photographic rhizome holding the world together.
Exploring and surfing time gave way to space, to elsewhere, to faraway realities; it was still travel “in camera”, but “reported”.

And here I am in a red and green dark room that will always be a picture tree, a slippery pole with photographic prizes at the top, a photosensitive paper house of wandering/unclaimed images, of slivers of stories, of screens.

In responding to François Hébel and François Barré’s invitation to guest-curate the Rencontres d’Arles, there could be no escaping the temptation to curate my own impressions.

Nonetheless, I wanted to free myself of nostalgic sepia and black-and-white and to play host to colour – the colours and nuances of friends and artists, of old and recent encounters and discoveries. These are the guests that make up the programme; I want it to be a snapshot of my contemporary memories, from past to present. The time has come. I must “go back”, return to my roots and share the booty of fifty years and more. I must finally agree to take part in the Rencontres, for the clock has struck. In the Middle Ages, the word rencontre meant the act of combat, as it still does in sport. But instead of fisticuffs I prefer its later sense of “chance encounter” – just as we say “good fortune” and “godsend”, those profoundly prompted coincidences that are another of my special drivers.

The starting equation was “Rencontre/ Photography/ Arles”. What rencontres have I been handed by this big bang, this fight between Arles and all sorts of arts, these radiant strokes of fortune? Image-writers, recyclers, witnesses, compilers, explorers, tamers, designers, irritators, mavericks, poets, great calligraphers, painters, soldiers, conjurers, creators of femmes fatales... Because it’s them, and because it’s me. They have helped me to see and look, to assert and reveal myself. I will therefore modestly be a kind of go-between, an interpreter, inviting them to show themselves, to “unveil” themselves to others amid stone backdrops that are a precious part of me.

Those expecting a “fashionista” festival will feel justifiably disappointed. And besides, what does la mode mean nowadays? I would prefer the masculine: un mode, a way of being, showing oneself, appearing. So do not look solely at the poses and postures, the fabrics and facepaint; dig beneath the skin and standpoint, and close in on what – among the millions or billions of images that have passed through my retina – has caught my eye, captured my tastes and colours, on the trail of white pebbles to guide those visiting this 39th edition.

“There is nothing more serious than futility”, said Cocteau, speaking with the voice of experience. There is nothing more essential than the incidental. My guests will come and give their version of what – beyond a fashion show, a decor, a dress, a necklace, a body, a face, a set of gestures, a picture – speaks to us about identity, presence, absence, the climactic “petite mort”, life, emptiness, yesterday, now, here and elsewhere.

I was also eager for Arles and its people to be directly involved in this year’s festival. Through their shots of the “best day of their life”, through the search for moments and faces that have evaporated from the recent history I have known, through works and days not so distant but already long gone, through projects that reach beyond folklore to excavate an entire past/present that is part of my personal “fabric”.

In short: backstage rather than limelight, anonymity rather than official pomp, true nakedness rather than frills, the humble and the anodyne rather than conventional glory and forced acknowledgement, impressions rather than obviousness, gaps, flaws, breaks, skids, incidents and “suspense” rather than a High Mass of peremptory certainties.

Light, even if chiaroscuro, can, when well directed, delve into the labyrinthine, initiatory recesses of the self. What I want to show is, in a sense, this open-heart surgery on a city and on my own rencontres.
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