Falls, Peterson, Torgovnik at Rencontres d’Arles

This summer, catch exhibitions by Sam Falls, Regine Petersen, and Jonathan Torgovnik at Recontres d’ Arles (on view through September 23, 2012).  Now in it’s 43rd year, Arles, one of the world’s largest photography festivals, is hosting 60 exhibitions, favoring mostly unpublished work, presented by its founders, teachers and photographers as well as curators who have emerged from their influential school at 20 heritage sites in the South of France.

Sam Falls, who’s work was profiled in Aperture #205, is exhibiting a series of images “investigating the medium’s potential as an art form,” he writes, “but [that] also continue exploring photography’s capacity for representation and challenging its veracity.” The exhibition, which is curated by Philip S. Block, showcases photographs that Falls has manipulated with Photoshop, then hand-painted as well. “The question this raises,” Falls states, “beyond specific medium’s ability to represent an object or idea, is the question of perception itself and how we relate today to photography and painting.”

Regine Petersen, one of the photographers featured in Aperture’s Regenerations 2: Tomorrow’s Photographers Today, is exhibiting a series of photographs about meteorites, what she calls “thought images,”  that mark her so-called map from the location of the falls and finds, to the personal lives of eye witnesses and descendants. “Rather than a reconstruction of the events,” she writes, Finding a Falling Star, presented by Olivier Richon, “is a collection of traces, an investigation into the workings of time, memory and history and an attempt to create a link between the ordinary and the sublime.” Petersen’s limited edition print Ladybug, 2006, a work from an earlier series, is considered typical of her style of “thought image.”

Jonathan Torgovnik‘s Intended Consequences, which is a series of environmental portraits made in Rwanda of women that were brutally raped during the Rwandan genocide and the children they bore from those encounters, was published as a monograph by Aperture in 2009 alongside a DVD produced by MediaStorm of interviews with the subjects. The exhibition at Rencontres d’Arles, presented by Tadashi Ono, is intended to spread these stories to a wider public, in hopes, Torgovnik writes, that “people will be inspired to act and work toward ensuring that similar acts of violence never happen again, and that those families can have a brighter future.”

Rencontres d’ Arles
Festival runs through September 23, 2012

Contact
34 rue du docteur Fanton
13200 Arles
33 (0) 4 90 96 76 06

Watch live streaming video from lesrencontresdarles at livestream.com.