I’ve always made excuses about not going to Arles, not least that I can’t really afford it. Probably the time I would have found it most worthwhile I was still teaching in FE, and my term always seemed to end just after the week of Arles. But really I think I’ve been scared to go. Events like this are great if you know a lot of people and go with a group of friends, but I think could be difficult if you don’t know that many people who attend. Several years I’ve tried to persuade some of my photographic friends to go with me, but somehow it has never happened, and this year for once I’m glad I didn’t make the effort.
Back when I wrote about photography for About.com, Arles was something I felt I had to cover, and I did, but writing from London and using the festival web site and the various reports in blogs and elsewhere, as well as what I knew about the photographers concerned etc. I don’t think I ever pretended to be at Arles, but there were times when I didn’t mention I wasn’t actually there.
I have been to Arles, but just not when it was full of photographers. I spent a day there as a tourist, very much on a Van Gogh trail, though back in the early 1970s it was rather less commercialised than I imagine it will be now. Earlier in that same week I’d visited Cezanne’s house and some of the places he painted, and climbed most of the way up Mte Ste Victoire before falling ill.
This year, according to Jean-Jacques Naudet writing in Le Journal de la Photographie, Arles with its major theme ‘a French school’ based on the “talents of the photographers, historians, and curators trained at the École Nationale Supérieure de Photographie (ENSP)” was a failure. Perhaps some would hardly be surprised that it would be “boring to death.”
It’s worth reading what he says about it, and that the only redeeming features were the “mad creativity of Dorothée Smith” and the ” magic that could only be provided … by those two legendary old men: Joseph Koudelka and Elliot Erwitt.” Both of course Magnum members – and on the new Magnum web site.
Sean O’Hagan’s review in ‘The Observer’ finds some more positive aspects (and some links, though I can’t share his enthusiasms), but again he concludes that it was a “festival that momentarily, at least, seems to have lost its way and its spirit of adventure.“