Up close with images of immigrant stories at the Rencontres d’Arles

In 1933, an aspiring Armenian photographer called Assadour Keussayan set up a small studio in the blue-collar Belsunce district of Marseille. Tiny in size, scraped together from savings, the place nonetheless had a grand name: Studio Rex. It operated for 85 years, finally shutting up shop only in 2018. Over that time, Keussayan and his family photographed thousands of people just like themselves — immigrants, mainly from French-speaking parts of Africa and different corners of the Mediterranean, often so fresh off the boat that you can see the shock in their eyes.

The bulk of the studio’s work was functional: ID photographs, “wallet photos” of loved ones back home. But the Keussayans, artists as well as artisans, also offered elegant studio portraiture in which clients swanked about in their smartest outfits — tailored three-piece suits, matching Batik shirts, a djellaba accessorised with a briefcase — to demonstrate how they’d made good in the new country.

There was sadness and longing here too. Studio Rex also specialised in elaborate, hand-coloured photomontages magicked up in the darkroom. You admire an Armenian wedding photo — then realise that the heads of the bride and groom have been lifted from their passport photos and stitched on to other people’s bodies and outfits. Another couple pose proudly with their toddler; but it turns out that the father — presumably here in Marseille while his family is overseas — has been added in later. Did any of these people meet again in real life, or was the photograph the closest they got? What do you call a memento of a moment that never happened?

Exquisitely presented in an exhibition titled Don’t Forget Me and a space not much larger than the original studio, the Studio Rex archive — some 10,000 images now in the possession of French collector Jean-Marie Donat — touches on many of the issues that reverberate around this year’s Rencontres d’Arles, now in its 54th edition.

In a festival composed of 45-plus exhibitions, plus others crammed into satellite venues and fringe spaces, it’s possible to find almost everything in the photographic universe. (Contemporary Nordic feminist photography? Check. Photogrammetry of Dalit mourning ceremonies or the largest Diane Arbus show on the planet? Step right this way.)

But again and again you’re struck by images that try to unpick the complexities of postcolonial identity, or ask what it means to be an outsider in a place that doesn’t quite see you for who you are. Given France’s recent turmoil — a week of riots in Marseille subsided just days before the festival’s opening — these are timely themes.

For sure, there is shimmering escapism on offer here too. This year’s big crowd-pleaser, in the airy Palais de l’Archevêché, is a retrospective of the great American colourist Saul Leiter. Rediscovered 15 years or so ago, Leiter is an absorbing, paradoxical figure: a photographer who documented a small corner of Manhattan for decades, yet who left many of his negatives unprinted and preferred to paint; a darling of the fashion pages of British Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar in the 1950s and 60s who disliked commercial work. Before his death in 2013, he was barely exhibited.

Here in Arles — a town where Van Gogh and Gauguin revelled in the light of southern France — you notice the neo-Impressionist tints of Leiter’s images, his pinks and persimmons and bruised blood-reds, as well as a fragile mystery that echoes Bonnard or Japanese ukiyo-e prints. Unlike hard-driving New York street photographers such as Garry Winogrand or Diane Arbus, Leiter rarely squared up to the people he shot, hovering instead behind curtains, railings or windows (he adored the chiming reflections of glass), making the chaos of the street into gorgeous kaleidoscopes.

A portly, homburg-wearing gent stands on the sidewalk in front of a lemon-yellow wall in low horizontal light, insensible to the inky shadows about to swallow him. A couple promenade past a lake whose shimmering surface reflects the soaring cliff of a building and the livid blue of the sky beyond. It is hard to believe this is Central Park rather than the Riviera. Despite the seductiveness of his palette — the colours make you ache — it is Leiter’s compositional talent that arguably makes him a true original.

Alongside old male masters like these, festival director Christoph Wiesner has worked hard to broaden the festival’s range since taking over in 2021, and it’s joyous to encounter fresh talent as well as new ways of working. The Iran-born, Paris-based photographer Hannah Darabi’s modest exhibition Soleil of Persian Square, based on the book of the same name, doesn’t look like much when you walk in: vacant shots of sunstruck Los Angeles, the conventional clutter of palm trees, hoardings, dusty low-rise buildings. But is that a squiggle of Farsi script next to the 7-Eleven sign? Why does that shopping mall look like a knock-off Assyrian palace?

Darabi has gone in search of “Tehrangeles”, the largest émigré Iranian community in the world. Alongside her carefully crafted urban landscapes of the city’s Westside, she displays slightly melancholy portraits of families at home as well as reproductions of small ads for well-to-do Iranians — cosmetic surgeons, auto dealers, realtors — who have launched new lives in Orange County. Soulful Persian pop music throbs through the gallery. Not unlike the Studio Rex archive, the show is a tribute to the imaginative resilience of diasporic communities, their ability to create something resembling home almost anywhere, and reflects a sadness that the replica never quite matches the original.

Another landscape, the countryside around Arles, is another of Wiesner’s big themes. The winners of this year’s BMW Art Makers commission, artist Eva Nielsen and curator Marianne Derrien spent months visiting the Camargue, a captivating but desolate territory of salt marshes, reed beds and abandoned industrial sites on the coast between Marseille and Montpellier.

Nielsen has created silkscreen prints, painting over her original photographs to make large-scale images that resemble rusted hunks of iron or pieces of mosquito netting draped across a drowning world. Their evanescent intangibility may be the point. For a more dispassionate account of the visual oddity of regional southern France, search out Eric Tabuchi and Nelly Monnier’s droll little show Grey Sun near the station — Bernd and Hilla Becher-like sequences of industrial buildings, abandoned petrol stations, shuttered American-style bars, pictured under indifferent skies. The true France profonde.

Equally revealing is a project in the Discovery Award exhibition devoted to emerging image-makers. For her installation Caribbean Dreams, the Jamaica-born Samantha Box, now based in New York, weaves together the skeins of her family history, which reach from the Caribbean back to India and Africa. Combining beloved heirlooms with found objects sourced at specialist groceries in the Bronx, Box photographs beautiful but unsettling still-lifes that she calls “Constructions”. Tropical plants sprout from pots of instant coffee, striving to grow under harsh artificial light. Star fruits, pomegranates and lilies are arrayed next to family photographs.

Despite their echoes of colonial-era Dutch still-lifes, these images are really a species of self-portraiture: Box’s attempts to piece together a history of herself from objects or tastes and textures that she half-remembers from childhood. Like these “Constructions”, her identity is a composite, she suggests. Will the jigsaw pieces ever fit together?

To September 4, rencontres-arles.com

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