Women photographers 'rebel against cult of male genius'
A mammoth 40 exhibitions will be shown at the Rencontres d'Arles photography festival in the south of France this summer, with hundreds of works by women leading the charge.
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"We wanted to make visible those who have long remained invisible," said director Christoph Wiesner.
As American art historian Lucy Lippard once said, for women artists, photography was one of the "major means of expression of emancipation to rebel against the cult of male genius", Wiesner added.
"A Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s" is the flagship exhibit of this year's event, which runs from 4 July to 25 September at the Atelier de la Mécanique, on the site of former railway workshops that have been transformed into a cultural centre.
Included are shots of dance in 1970s New York by French photographer Babette Mangolte, who places the spectator at the heart of the performance.
Les #RencontresArles 2022 ! Découvrez l'affiche de la 53e édition !
— Arles, les Rencontres de la photographie (@rencontresarles) March 22, 2022
SEMAINE D’OUVERTURE: 4 — 10 JUILLET
EXPOSITIONS & STAGES: 4 JUILLET — 25 SEPTEMBRE
Photo : Mitch Epstein. Ahmedabad, Gujarat, Inde, 1981.
Design : #ABMstudio pic.twitter.com/USNcKa8wEK
Meanwhile the issue of aging is explored by American Susan Meiselas in her immersive and acoustic "cartography of the body".
Léa Habourdin, also a witness to the passing of time, will plunge visitors into the heart of primary forests, of which she has developed photographs on prints that are not resistant to daylight, and which will therefore change between the beginning and end of the exhibition.
This year's festival seeks to "rebuild the character" of Lee Miller, a model often reduced to her collaboration with the artist Man Ray.
She was a talented portraitist and a war photographer who accompanied the American army to Europe during the Liberation of France from 1944 to 1945.
The war will also be present in another major exhibition, which retraces 160 years of humanitarian action photos thanks to the archives of the Red Cross.
This edition will be dedicated to Olivier Etcheverry, who was the scenographer of the Rencontres d'Arles for more than 20 years, and who died in March.
He "reinvented the staging" of photography in unusual places, said festival president Hubert Védrineand, adding he also "embodied with elegant modesty and joyful generosity the soul and values of the event".
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