This year’s festival is one of the strongest editions with highlights including an exhibition dedicated to movie directors’ (from Stanley Kubrick to Derek Jarman) scrapbooks, a focus on Agnès Varda’s passion for Sète, Wim Wenders’ polaroids, to Gregory Crewdson static and perplexing evening scenes, contemporary Nordic photography, the festival features some of the best talents in photography today. Among many other important established and emerging artists, activists, and photojournalists.

Søsterskap highlights photographers’ strong role over several generations in the Nordic countries. The exhibition explores the welfare state from a perspective of intersectional feminism. “The welfare state is a woman’s best friend” is a feminist slogan.

Agnès Varda cherished a particular fondness for Sète. Sétoise by adoption as a teenage refugee there during World War II, she returned to the town every year until the beginning of the 1960’s. She began in 1947 as an amateur photographer, then turned professional. Her Rolleiflex captured friends, sailors, the quays of the southern town, water jousts on the canals… and soon the fisherfolk and narrow traverses of Pointe courte, the working-class neighborhood by the Étang de Thau that anchors her first film, shot in 1954.

Agnès Varda’s contact sheets reveal her photographic journey. When we compare the 800-odd photos she took in Sète with the painstaking selection the young woman undertook in 1953 to prepare her film, we begin to see her vision. These are not film stills of the shooting or the set, but images antedating the idea of the film or forming part of its conception. These reference and scouting photographs, collected on nine sheets, were her inspiration for scenes, atmospheres, even particular shots. Her favorite subjects and motifs are confirmed by their reappearance in contemporary or subsequent prints.

In late 1976, I shot The American Friend in Hamburg and Paris. It starred Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper and was based on the novel Ripley’s Game by Patricia Highsmith. Polaroids were the analogue predecessor of instant photography. They truly represented a photographic notebook, only that the cameras spat out printed “originals”. I recorded my location survey and pinned the little prints on the wall of the production office. The script person took Polaroids of every scene for continuity reasons. I photographed my actors during preparation and sometimes in between scenes. And even in the story, Polaroids were used, in our case by Dennis Hopper who played the dubious character of Tom Ripley and who became so much our “American Friend” during the film that we changed its title from Framed to what it has become ever since.

Over the past three decades, Gregory Crewdson has been fleshing out a portrait of middle America, that America of picket-fence suburbia gazing wide-eyed at the glimmers of a fading dream. His cinematographically staged photos have gradually pieced together the fragments of a twilight world. His œuvre stunningly interweaves an autobiographical dimension with the portrait of a gloryless America. Wan lights and deserted streets are recurring tropes in his works, which are prepared like movie sets to produce photos that quite astonishingly remain images from nonexistent films.

Les Rencontres d’Arles is staged in the Roman city of the South of France until 24th September.

Image: © Emma Sarpaniemi by Two Ways to Carry a Cauliflower