For 38 years Jeff Dunas attends the Arles meetings and he photographs them.
His memory album: we open it here.
It was Arles!
Exceptionally, today’s edition will remain freely accessible all this week.
Jean-Jacques Naudet
Being a photographer means being part of a global community. Arles is where the community comes together, like an industry summer camp. – Jeff Dunas
Arles – 38 years and over by Jeff Dunas
As editor of the magazine Collectors Photography in the mid-80s, I decided to go to Arles and look for new photographs to publish in the magazine in 1986. As anyone who has tried knows, finding a room in Arles during what was then called the Rencontres Internationales de la Photo (RIP which was an unfortunate acronym because if in French it sounds good, in English it means Rest in Peace) is almost impossible.
Knowing exactly who to call to lead the way, I called JJ Naudet who, at that time, had already been to the festival countless times and had not planned to go that year. He told me to tell his hotel that he wasn’t coming and to ask for his room. In this hotel, all guests come every year and keep the same rooms. What I didn’t know was that by taking Naudet’s room, it became mine and I have stayed there every year since. It’s like having a timeshare in Arles. Same week every year for 37 years (couldn’t make it in 2020).
This first year, in a nice family restaurant Dumas On the second floor above the Café Van Gogh on the Place du Forum, I was having dinner and noticed Lucien Clergue, co-founder of RIP, eating with friends. Naturally, I sent over a glass of champagne. After dinner, he came to sit at my table and the first thing he said to me was “you must be American.” When I asked him why he said that, he replied that the French had little respect for him but that Americans had always appreciated him and his work. He said that the gesture of sending a glass of champagne was much appreciated and thus began a friendship that lasted for decades until his passing.
The next day, he invited me to the much-vaunted private lunch at Maryse Cordesse’s where I discovered the core of what was then the Rencontres. Among the guests, Florette Lartigue, Cartier-Bresson (seen fleetingly of course), Martine Franck and her brother Eric, Jean Claude Lemagny, Joyce Tenneson, Pierre Boran, Willy Ronis and especially for me that day, Jean Dieuzaide ( “YAN”) who adopted me and introduced me to many people present.
At that time, the projections at the Théâtre Antique were still done using slide projectors and we were sometimes treated to the spectacle of a photographer’s slides catching fire and burning before our eyes. However, the evenings organized by Lucien were phenomenal and I have only missed a handful of them since the eighties. I remember one evening when Keichi Tahara was showing so many images from his Paris series that people began to quietly leave. It went on for so long that I was probably among less than 200 at the end. Fortunately, he saved some of the best images for last.
Kodak came along and invested in the program in the 1980s, which significantly changed the character of the festival – it was now about “meetings” in the American sense rather than informal French-style meetings – people who showed their work had disappeared. Around the Place, gone was the spontaneity that I had only witnessed in my first year but which was characteristic of the first years in Arles.
Suddenly you needed “badges” and had to be on lists to attend functions. Fortunately this only lasted a few years and everything quickly became French again. What’s interesting is that around this time, François Hébel had tried out for the director position and did a decent job before leaving to work for Magnum if I’m not mistaken. Return to Clergue and return to other beautiful evenings at the Théâtre Antique.
Then we had a rotation of directors including Claude Hudelot, Louis Mesplé and even Agnès de Gouvion Saint Cyr. In 1995, it was Michel Nurisdany’s turn, whose screening of Nobuyoshi Araki’s works with graphic images of naked Japanese women hanging upside down and tied up like sausages caused a riot one night, with tomatoes thrown at Michel and him leaving with a police escort. I remember people entering the projection booth and physically disconnecting the evening’s presentation. Censorship prevailed. Unfortunately, I found myself sitting next to the wonderful Yvette Troispoux, then in her mid-80s, and all she could say was “That’s not normal,” as she watched Araki’s bondage images. It was tragic. Joan Fontcuberta had his turn in 1996 and the inimitable Christian Caujolle in 1997. Then came a wonderful year-long program of the indomitable Giovanna Calvenzi with a magnificent exhibition of Massimo Vitali with his work on Italian beaches. Giovanna is the grande dame of Italian photography in many ways and a wonderful person. Gilles Mora was next. Gilles played old school rock and roll guitar with Ralph Gibson on a stage at the Allyscamps but only served for two years. One of the great exhibitions he curated was of Debbie Fleming Caffery, an unknown but incredible American photographer, born in Louisiana. Gilles was a big fan of the mythology of the American South, from her music to Eggleston to Caffery. He brought the South (of the USA) to Arles.
However, dealing with different directors every year or two was not a recipe for success, as it clearly took more than a year or two to fully master how to run a photography festival and Hebel later oversaw the festival for many years. His idea of giving many galleries and curators carte blanche to organize exhibitions was mixed each year, but there were always big highlights and he definitely went above and beyond in cases like bringing JR to Arles before before he becomes a household name. He had to run the festival for years with strikes – a wonderful but unfortunate result was seeing Harry Gruyart’s astonishing work screened in a restaurant in the Camargue because his evening presentation was canceled due to the workers’ strike. – he had to wait a whole year to present the show.
What I clearly prefer about the Rencontres, apart from the meetings that still take place today, are the evenings, but the exhibitions that demand a lot of energy and resources remain the heart of the subject and I will not miss a single one.
When I founded the Palm Springs Photo Festival in 2006, the only thing that inspired me from Arles was the idea of “encounters” – the camaraderie that was lacking a focal point in the United States. Having been its director for 18 years, I know that I have transmitted to thousands of American photographers the essence that so intoxicated me at the Encounters.
As we move forward into a new era with a visionary patron, the character has changed forever from the old RIP and why not? It’s a new day and new Meetings. I will be there.
Jeff Dunas
https://www.instagram.com/jeffdunas/
www.rencontres-arles.com
