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Ohn 16 June 1963, a mechanic from Albuquerque named Paul Villa was called – through telepathic messages from aliens – to photograph their ship. The result was a picture of something flying in the sky. Villa’s story is similar to that of a Swiss father, Billy Meier, who saw his first flying saucer at the age of five, and has taken more than 1,400 photos since then. One of the most iconic images of Meier’s plane is in the famous scene in Fox Mulder’s office in The X-Files. Added to Meier’s image are the words: I Want to Believe.
We Are Not Alone: Strange Pictures is one of the most popular shows Art Workshops in Arles this year, the world’s most famous photography festival. The exhibit is based on many samples from archives and private archives that show visible “records” of UFOs, mysterious events and close encounters with aliens. Most of the photos were made between the 1960s and 1980s when reports of UFO sightings were at their peak – and in the US, a place that boasted the highest number of UFO sightings over the years. Of course, all the pictures are due to old tricks (dropping a plate on a cable in front of the camera), unknown cases or strange accidents of analog film. They may be childish and fake, but they still draw you in with their fascinating stories.
The 1995 Ray Santilli pseudo-documentary Alien Autopsy, with suspicious black-and-white footage showing the gruesome dismemberment of the Roswell alien found in New Mexico in the 1940s, made it to the international news channels – ten years after the release of ET. But in the film, a journalist who broadcasts the video on French TV seems to be very upset about the split, and said at the time it didn’t occur to him that it was fake. The disturbing truth that this exhibition reveals is that if the desire to believe is strong enough, a picture can convince us of anything.
We Are Not Alone also proves that some of the best shows in Arles are by amateurs and unknown artists. This 57th edition looks fun and interesting, with a few major exhibitions of great living artists (there are smaller exhibitions and William Klein and Edward Steichen). At La Crosière, an Ivorian painter Paul Codewho died in 2021, is getting the first major exhibition in France – the result of more than 15 years of museum work with thousands of negatives.
Kodjo had a studio in Abidjan and photographed the city’s dance halls and fashion, and was one of the first artists in Africa to create “picture novels”. At the center of the exhibition is a series of seductive, romantic and seductive images, shot in the 1960s and 1970s, which were created and published in the Sunday paper every week. It’s an animated soap opera that appears on sofas in living rooms with themes like Lost and Found. Their sexual ambivalence, sharp style and sense of social behavior give an insight into the social and cultural life of Abidjan during the economic and cultural development of the country.
At the Méchanique Generale in Luma Arles, Animal Model jumping through 200 years of animal photography. It would be corny, but cleverly curated, divided into sections that examine everything from the 19th century to TikTok videos of animals doing cute and funny things. It provides a new entry point for great artists including Elliot Erwitt, Andreas Gursky, Roni Horn and Hiroshi Sugimoto, with enough styles, techniques, images to follow and lists to keep them moving.
You can wander from arts such as Masahisa Fukase’s Ravensthe provocative and thoughtful Japanese portrait of a symbolic bird and its struggles with mental illness, to the portraits of a Polish biologist. Simona Kossak who lived in a cabin in the middle of the Białowieża Forest with a lynx and a wild boar, for thirty years. There are moments of sadness, violence, and pure joy. There are also many pictures of cats. Is it populist? Sure. But it is undeniable.
The exhibition’s themes of coexistence and rethinking of the relationship between humans and nature are in line with a number of new exhibitions currently on display at Luma, including Verena Paravel’s. Deltaa film that challenges the human way of seeing the world by using different camera and sound techniques, revealing sounds that are often not heard by humans – the appearance of crustaceans, the croaking of frogs under water, the vibration of reeds sound and appear similar to our own sound.
At this time Hello Ismailovanew show, Amanat, the Sacred Forest is another poetic and captivating exhibition of the Uzbek artist. His films, sculptures and photographs connect with ancient legends and places. The 2017 film The Haunted is Ismailova’s love letter to the ghost of the now extinct Tiger, a Central Asian icon. He gathered memories, stories and dreams, weaving them together here in a visual poem of devastating beauty.
This video features three new videos filmed in the world’s largest walnut forest, Arslanbob, in southern Kyrgyzstan. Known as the healing forest, it is named after a 12th century mystic; local people believe that forest nuts are hallucinogenic. It is a place with a lot of nature that is very deep in the social and spiritual aspects – qualities that are visible in the large pictures of the waterfalls painted in Arslanbob in different seasons; people come to perform rituals and worship the water of this sacred place. Let’s imagine that we are indeed many, and we too become worshipers who look up in awe, unfazed by the power of the waterfall and its amazing beauty. The landscape changes with the seasons, but the sound of the water remains throughout the film, giving the environment a voice.
There is also magic and magic in Ming Smith’s paintings. Wandering Light at the famous church of Saint Anne is the first exhibition of the 80-year-old American artist in France, although he often works in Paris. Here, his connection with the paintings in his soft, subtle eyes is evident – although it would have been clearer if the type of prints shown here would have been a little more sensitive.
Smith is drawn to jazz, to things that don’t stand still, and he shows this in the way he photographs people, not trying to frame them in space but to capture their energy – his 1978 portrait of Sun Ra is a masterpiece. The images in the dark, fluid, loose black-and-white images appear vibrant and vivid, refusing to be reduced to a single form. Every time you go back to them, you see something new. His use of black and white recalls Goethe’s saying: “Black belongs to things that change their state.”
Sometimes a show is so beautiful that it’s painful to watch – but beauty and pain often are, as Martine Barrat does so wonderfully. City life. The Algerian-born, French-raised artist, who is 93 years old, moved to New York in 1968 to pursue her dance career – but after the injury, she began making videos and photographs. In the 1970s, he began working with two famous South Bronx bands – the Roman Kings and the Ghetto Brothers. The movie he made about them, he called You Make Mistakes, You Make Timeit drew thousands of people to the Whitney when it was shown there in 1978, but it is not known in Europe.
Barrat’s films, including his intimate portrait of gang leader Vickie, are displayed alongside portraits of people from the South Bronx, Brooklyn and Harlem. A few of his songs are composed with kindness and poignancy, whether it’s a six-year-old boxer wrapping his arms before school or a clean-cut gang leader exploring the trash of the Bronx the day he’s released from prison. Barrat really sees people, and appreciates them very much. As he says, “It is in the midst of violence that I find love.” That’s the biggest gift they share with this show. His pictures are at least as constructed as those of Bruce Davidson, Dawoud Bey or even Roy DeCaravaPost-war scenes in Brooklyn. I staggered in surprise.
Although there are many shows of old groups based on big pictures this year, and some popular ones are lost (shows of Pat Smith and Charlotte Gainsbourg and nonsense) UFOs, animals, magical forests and the visuals of the connection of beings create a beautiful and harmonious relationship. Where the eccentric gymnast rubs shoulders with Klein; while the neglected masters are revealed and the viral panda TikTok can be seen as important as the most expensive image maker in the world, the festival continues to challenge the systems and ideas of what constitutes the most important image of our time.
