Rockers, prisoners and Argentines top Arles photo festival

Organisers are hoping Mick Jagger will put in an appearance. Topping the bill for the rock photography trail, he puts in some 70 celluloid appearances, as the subject of portraits by Cecil Beaton, Anton Corbijnm Annie Liebovitz and Peter Lindbergh.
 
The Argentina Bicentenary Celebration Trail is headlined by a retrospective of 90-year-old Argentine Léon Ferrari’s work in the église Sainte-Anne.
 
The curator says the choice of a church for the exhibition was paradoxical as the artist has spent most of his career criticising the Catholic Church.
 
Elsewhere, film-maker Marin Karmitz, in collaboration with Christian Caujolle, presents his first exhibition of his collection of direct photographs, videos and installations using photography at the église des Frères Prêcheurs, and at the Salle Henri Comte, Paolo Woods’s portraits of Iranian families are displayed alongside coverage of last year’s post-election protests in Tehran.
 
An exhibition based on the report of France’s Inspector General of Prisons, Jean Marie Delarue, shows the terrifying world of French gaols.
 
“The exhibition also demonstrates the limitations of photography, which cannot convey the nuances of everyday unhappiness in prison,” says exhibition curator François Hébel.
 
“In a photo a TV set, a workshop and a library seem to offer possibilities which in fact are non-existent for most prisoners, and certainly not available on a regular basis. The rules of hygiene and safety are flouted every day, the psychological stresses are chronic, and the laws regarding the minimum wage and access are broken by the state itself. None of this is visible in a photo.”
 
The Luma Foundation, the official partner of the festival, is backing several photography and book awards. The Parc des Ateliers contains some 30 galleries, publishers, bookshops, magazines, institutions and others. Some 72,000 people went to last year’s festival.