Reflecting the long collaboration between the Rencontres d’Arles and the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie and their shared commitment to young photographers, for several years the festival has given three of the school’s graduates an opportunity to show their work as part of the official programme. This year’s jury, including Temple gallery founder and co-director Anna Planas and Rencontres d’Arles director Sam Stourdzé, chose proposals by Guillaume Delleuse, Vincent Marcq and Clémentine Roche. Each echoes the 2016 festival in his or her own style and approach.

Guillaume Delleuse photographs instinctively and on the spur of the moment, carrying on the tradition of great street photographers like Garry Winogrand and the aestheticism of Scandinavian photographers such as Anders Petersen and JH Engström. Questioning whether meaning can be given to the mere fact of looking, he offers a reinterpretation of street photography by the young generation to which he belongs. Through observing, walking and an obsession with crowds and movement, he gives us his contemporary vision of a shared space: the street.

Clémentine Roche tells the story of P., whose identity remains unknown and existence uncertain. By salvaging over 800 photographs and taking them out of context without, however, completely cutting them off from their story, she focuses on ‘the other photography’, the trivial, the unknown, the vernacular, photography that is deemed ‘inferior’ and forgotten in an old cardboard box. The out-of-sight and omnipresent waiting take shape through P.’s obsession with the outdoors, presented in the Mirador series. Lacking reason and freedom, P. seems to have locked himself up in an anxiety-producing system. Constantly photographing the outdoors through the same window, he sometimes manages to capture certain human presences, like ephemeral spectres. Echoing this series, the Des Petits Pigeons video shows P.’s cockroach phobia. Subtitles—the transcript of a recorded conversation with P.—widen the gap with reality and help to express the sense of absence of a man on the brink of madness who has become a shadow of his former self.

Vincent Marcq‘s visual and theoretical experimentation tackles various issues involving the idea of home. He questions how places are appropriated, the saturation of space and hoarding. His Try to Build a House project seeks to construct and deconstruct the contemporary home by challenging architecture’s basic prerequisites: stability, foundations and building codes. Combining several media—photography, 3D models, books and video—his installation prompts us to think about what impact the modern Western world’s geographical, economic and political configurations have on the organisation of our private space.