Arise early again, it's a lovely morning and I go to the Martin Parr and Eugene Richard's seminar morning in theatre.
A pleasant diversion indoors for a few hours in the air-conditioned shade.
I went to a Martin Parr seminar over 20 years ago in Harrogate, just as he'd finished his book 'Bad Weather' upon his return from Ireland - as we all know, he's still as enthusiastic and prolific as ever.
During questions someone asks him if he does not think he has been just a little too prolific, he replies that he admits to having photographic diarrhoea!.... and he has a certain frustration with someone like Gursky.
Parr has spent many years commenting on Tourism and Mass Consumption, then Gursky comes along and does it all in one photograph along the lines 99 cents, prints three large ones off and sells them all for millions.
Jeff Wall does something similar apparently, he prints one of for himself, gifts one to an institution and sells the third, the proceeds of which keep him going until he produces the next one - something tells me I've been doing it wrong all these years.
He tells the audience he admits to being overproductive and wants to wind down a bit to help champion other less known photographers. He mentions Peter Mitchell a contemporary of his from Manchester Polytechnic who had a colour show in Leeds way before it was fashionable and so de rigeur to be working in black and white.
He is also mentoring one of the Discovery Awards candidates tomorrow night a Lithuanian who's been photographing the country side and villages around him for some 20 years and no one ever heard of him. As he finishes off the questions, everyone finishes off applauding and
I think of a question, but it's too late - having shot so much concerning the joys and woes of tourism, I was wondering where he went for his holidays :o)
Eugene Richards followed, showing some of his stark early black and whites through to his new project and publication "The Blue Room"
I have to admit not to being over familiar with Richard's work and the black and whites were very moving, from documenting his wife's illness and eventual death from cancer (instigated by herself I hasten to add) to his documentary work on A and E departments in Chicago and his street works on gang culture in the US.
The Blue Room is his first major project in colour and is hanging in Les Ateliers in Arles as part of the Friends of Nan Goldin's guest curation.
Very quiet calm colour studies of abandoned houses in the mid west.
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I leave the theatre and the sun, at just after mid day, has that bleached out whiteness that immediately stops your eyes down to f64 ... no wonder Van Gogh went mad. what with this and the Mistral!
I pull out my sunglasses and I go back for lunch - Dinu and Frida are at Davina's - Dinu's gone in for an artist's talk.
Meet them again at the Rue Raspail, they are all just sitting down to lunch - I want to make the Willy Ronis exhibition tour, but have a cup of tea whilst they finish their lunch.
Frida and I head across town to the Chapel where the Willy Ronis exhibition tour has already started.
Willy Ronis is now 99 years old, one of the last of the 20th's century black and white photographers from the same school as many, Bresson, Doisneau, Kertesz - you name them and Ronis probably knew them.
I cannot help but be moved by the sight of this now frail old man in a wheelchair, surround 15-20 deep by admirers, using a small portable amplifier and microphone giving his own exhibition tour.
Amidst the sea of grey, blue, and beige he is wearing his very own yellow jersey - I wonder if he's donned this deliberately as if to say he was leading his very own personal Tour de France, and for this brief moment in time in a very packed Eglise St Anne maybe he is. He is being feted like a rock star and the press and the TV are out in force along with the general public. he speaks for a good hour or so - but the church is cool and his audience patient.
Even though in a wheelchair there is still a glint in his eye and a smile on his face as he speaks with an enthusiasm and childish abandon.
The acoustics are bad, along with my French but the language is not a barrier in picking out the frisson of excitement he instils as he talks about his work... and he's lapping it up - why shouldn't he. I've seen most of the images before at a touring retrospective at the Manchester City Art Gallery about ten years ago - a couple I hadn't seen were a pleasant surprise.
The venue today was interesting, the Eglise St Anne - totally empty, no pews, no altar, no furniture (... and as my daughter points out-no toilets!)
One of Ronis's most famous photographs of two lovers looking out over Paris is placed at the very end where the altar would have been.
© Willy Ronis - Rapho - Two lovers over Paris, Place de la Bastille, Paris 1957
They've lifted him up the few steps in his wheelchair to finish off the tour. It seems this photograph has been placed at the high altar of French Photojournalism with an almost religious zealotry. I smile and leave and across the square I'm bought back down to Earth by the humour of the Duane Michals retrospective at the gallery across the road.
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Duane Michals. The exhibit is a retrospective so includes all his well known photographic narratives from over the years... one of my personal favourites is here
Again, I've seen many of these before, previous exhibitions and from publications - but they've stood the test of time and some have even matured along the way. His new colour work is a little scathing about the US gallery scene and art market... a large colour print of a gherkin is underscored in his own handwriting : "A Gursky Gherkin is just a Giant Pickle"
In another set of black and whites he take Cindy Sherman to task with his own self portraits of himself in a wig outlining the art adventures of a one 'Sidney Sherman' Jeff Koons, The Dusseldorf School, Andreas Serano - they all come under fire.
his recent book was entitled "Foto Follies: How Photography Lost it's Virginity on the Way to the Bank"
He's presenting tomorrow night in the Theatre d'Antiques in the evening - I quite fancy that one.
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Upstairs we move onto the Japanese photographer Naoya Hatakeyama, the darkened room at the back of the gallery hosted a small but exquisite set of architectural night studies, each in their own compact bijou backlit lightboxes.
They worked well - both in subject matter and their execution..... but I can't help but think they must have been a bugger to hang!
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Above the Cloisters upstairs, the mood is more sombre for an exhibition of racist lynchings that took place in the US from the late 19th century until the middle of the 20th Century.
The James Allen Collection (warning - some may find this link deeply disturbing) displayed (from the Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta) commercially available postcards celebrating lynchings in the Deep South.
Entitled 'Without Sanctuary' it was particularly unsettling.
(.... yes you read that correctly, postcards! ... and celebrating!)
At a time when a black president has been elected to lead the USA, this exhibit depicts a period of American history that most citizens would have preferred to have been buried - but they are not. As soon as you enter the room you want to leave - it is indeed very uncomfortable viewing, the power of their content was unquestionable and leaves many viewers very moved, some to tears.
All taken mainly by miscellaneous unknown anonymous photographers, the photographs are deeply disturbing, casting a gaze upon as dark a period of American history as the Holocaust was to Germany. People dressed in their Sunday best surround the hapless victims like colonial big game hunters with their trophies....
... the black side of me envisages: "having a lovely time. wish you were here, Auntie Doris" ... not funny.
I find it all very difficult viewing and cannot linger too long on a good deal of them - but I see them all - it's a strange sensation witnessing the horrors that photography has recorded these past 150 years - the sense of guilt of belonging to such a race that can perpetuate such horrors leaves you feeling you owe it to the victims to force yourself to that gaze - not out of a morbid curiosity but almost in the same sense as a memorial service - as has been said so many times before these events have to remembered.
I'm thrown back to my childhood, watching the Ascent of Man, where Jacob Bronowski, questioning our quest for ultimate power and knowledge, pulls up his sleeve and kneels down to lift up a handful of sludgy ashes from the gas ovens of Auschwitz:
"I beseech you from the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken"
The phrase goes through my head as I wander around. We leave in silence.
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We go back for a shower and to get changed. We've been invited out to dinner with Davina and Virgile, they want to buy us something to eat for helping out. We are joined by Anthony and Erica and another artist friend Noel, who's been joined by his niece for the weekend, she's down from Paris. They're both from Indonesia I think, but seemd to have lived everywhere from Canada to Switzerland - it's a truly international table. His niece, I never got her name, didn't look much older than Frida, we are then told she's in he mid twenties and she works for an advertising agency in Paris as an art director. We finish our meal and then I drag everyone down to the Theatre d'Antiques for the evening's presentation.
After dragging out the Pictet Awards, an annual Environmental Awards with some of the nominated 'usual suspects', we then have to listen to the mentors of the Arles Rencontres Discovery Awards.
A slide presentation was put together with a solo lone bassist improvising to the dialogue and the visuals. The images accompanied by the bass and the husky dulcet gallic tone poems of the presenters leave me feeling I should be sat in a Parisienne French cafe somewhere, wearing striped t shirt and beret, listening to some beat poetry and inhaling the aroma of Gauloise.
Parr finishes off the presentation, the only one in English by nominating his Lithuanian Discovery, Rimaldas Viksraitis.
He seems uncomfortable in his presentation after the pretentiousness of his predecessors and finishes off, Simon Cowell X factor style, by telling them why this man should recieve their vote.... and in the end he does.
The award is announced at the end of the Rencontres and he does indeed win.
The audience laugh along at his speech and delivery, but the laughter that follows during the visuals leaves me feeling a tad uncomfortable again.
The country lives of those he has recorded in Lithuania looks hard and harsh - an image of a man blow torching the skin off a pig with a cockerel sat on his head seems to amuse them all. Yes, some of them were funny images, but they outlined the pathos of an isolated community's existence in a harsh part of 21st Century Europe.
I feel a quiet applause would have been more appropriate than the laughter as a way of thanking him for bringing them to out attention.
Finally the bassist gives up and puts down his bow...
It's quarter past 11 and, waiting for Duane Michals, I'm beginning to feel duped - I'm thinking 'what on earth are they doing keeping a man of his years up til this time?'.
It's the interval - the bar is 20 deep, and so are the toilets! ... as I'm queuing (the men's and women's are two shared toilets for an audience of about 1500-2000), I'm thinking that this was a Roman Theatre and if they were supposed to have been so good with plumbing and sanitation, what the hell were they playing at plumbing in only two toilets!
Eventually Duane Michals does not disappoint - a man of 79 years of age moonwalks backwards onto the stage much to the laughter and applause of the audience.
He delivers with all the aplomb of a seasoned stand up comedian - he's obviously done this before. Starting with the his 'Three Dicks" series with Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford, he moves on to the "take three pills and see Mount Fuijama" series.
He stops to tell jokes and howl occasionally at the full moon as it peeps from behind the clouds, to remind us no doubt about the short step from genius to madness.
He seems brilliantly rehearsed and an equally brilliant showman, but he delivers some salient points along the way and a scathing critique about what's happening in the 21st Century Photographic Art market.
All his life he has mainly worked in New York, producing those black and white narratives, deeply personal and more often than not involving himself by way of self portraiture.
He tells the audience that he thinks there are some very clever cameras out there, and that sometimes he thinks the cameras are cleverer than the people behind them!
You should not have to go to China to point your camera in other peoples faces and things, the world is full of enough of that imagery already - he knows what a car looks like, a mountain looks like and what a tree looks like.
If mentions if he sees another picture of Cuba he's gonna puke!
He implores the audience to turn their cameras on themselves - not literally but as an exploration of the self.
So twice today I have witnessed two of my favourites that have so shaped the history of twentieth century photography with the legacy they have left us. As he finishes on a last joke, it's almost a standing ovation. he has left the audience wanting more and even at 79 with the vigours of a younger man he moonwalks back off the stage.
I'm reminded of my two favourite quotes about art, style and technique.
Picassso: "when I was a child I could draw like Raphael, but it has taken me my whole life to draw like a child"
... and Michaelangelo Antonioni's "Technical problems do not exist, style permeates technique"
... and a last good one from Michals:
"A FAILED ATTEMPT TO PHOTOGRAPH REALITY" "How foolish of me to believe that it would be that easy. I had confused the appearances of trees and people and automobiles with reality itself and believed that a photograph of these transient appearances to be a record of it. I am a reflection photographing other reflections within a reflection. It is a melancholy thruth that I must always fail. To photograph the ultimate reality is to photograph nothing."
It has indeed been a very long day again - I have no problem sleeping!
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