Identity and discovery.

TRANSPHOTOGRAPHIQUES

LILLE, FRANCE

MAY 10-JUNE 17, 2007

FOTO FESTIVAL

LODZ, POLAND

MAY 17-27, 2007

PHOTO ESPANA

MADRID, SPAIN

MAY 30-JULY 22, 2007

RENCONTRES D'ARLES

ARLES, FRANCE

JULY 3-SEPTEMBER 16, 2007

Ultimately, the purpose of photography is to combine the transmission of information with the photographer's self-expression. Likewise, each festival has a certain character and identity unto its own while it provides the widest opportunity to discover new work using various structures: exhibitions and curated discoveries, as well as formal and informal portfolio reviews.

Of late, many photographers, pioneered by the likes of Lady Hawarden, F. Holland Day, Claude Cahun, Francesca Woodman, and others, have reengaged the process of self-discovery through self-portraiture. This has become an increasingly important theme among young fine art photographers seeking to define themselves against a mass of photographers. This brief report looks at four festivals held this year whose characteristics and informative elements demonstrate the strength of this form of "vision quest."

Set in Lille, a city in northeast France, Transphotographiques is a small but important festival that seeks to go beyond conventional limitations of photography. Approximately seventy exhibitions were held in galleries and institutions, including a former postal facility, around town and in nearby villages. The festival largely featured film-related photography. Its exhibitions ranged from paparazzi photos to the archives of the legendary Cahiers du Cinema. Major retrospectives included the work of Michel Ginies and Barry Harcourt, as well as late studio and press photographers including Leo Mirkine and Sem Presser. There were many works featuring stars like Brigitte Bardot and Yves Montand but few vintage prints. The selection of work appeared to influence the type of photographer coming to meet the international cast of reviewers, who hailed from ten countries as well as France. Most interesting were the bodies of work by Finnish artist Martine van Biervliet who lives in Paris and Lille. One of her works combined sophisticated surrealist-inflected word and image games with documentary-like images of her mother playing on the French phonemes occurring in the words for mother (maman) and moment (moment), as well as a similarly inflected series of small poems accompanying her images of aging flesh, rumpled beds, and clocks--an altogether interesting depiction of women and the detailing of lives and identities.

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Foto Festival 2007 in Lodz, Poland, which is perhaps the best small festival and is led by one of the sharpest young festival directors, Krzysztof Candrowicz, was marked by things both Finnish and Spanish. The Spanish contingent, curated by Moritz Neumuller of Photo Espana, featured examinations of the soul of Spanish contemporary reality, with special attention paid to issues of religion, identity, immigration politics, and metropolitanism. Spanish identity--including issues of marriage and immigration--was explored by ten young photographers. There was also an exhibition of new Finnish photography by women artists from the famous school of art and design, TaiK, that took on themes of identity and coming of age. Yet, the surprise of the festival, indeed the actual "discovery" of the festival, was Arja Hyytiaien, a young Finnish photographer who has nothing to do with TaiK. In "Distance Now," Hyytiaien portrayed the story of an emotional break-up in an elegiac mix of black-and-white and color photographs. An interesting aspect was the mix of styles used in her visual storytelling that reflected past artists with whom she has studied. The influences of Swede Anders Petersen and Viktor Kolar of Prague's legendary FAMU as well as the Parisian sensibilities of Christian Caujolle of Agence Vu (where Hyytiaien is now represented) were evident in "Distance Now," a powerful work of self-discovery and expression of the formation of personal identity.

Arguably the best curated and best run large festival in Europe, Photo Espana this year celebrated its tenth anniversary with both a change of management and a sort of greatest hits series of shows. However, several things stood out and addressed the themes of identity. First, the bodies of work by the Spanish collective NOPHOTO documented the neighborhood of Matadero surrounding the former city slaughterhouse. Second, a show representing five Spanish photographers, many of whom participated in Lodz, looked at the Hispanic/Latino world at large. The show will travel with the Instituto Cervantes as part of a project representing Spanish art throughout the world. There was also a significant showing of Italian neorealism from 1932-60 that traced Italian identity in photographs and films from the Mussolini era through the postwar period of reconstruction. Any weakness in this year's festival was offset by the amazing quality of the portfolios reviewed for this year's "Discoveries of Photo Espana" and the unofficial review sessions that accompanied it. Whittled down beforehand from over eight hundred entrants to sixty and judged by a distinguished jury of curators, gallerists, publishers, and collectors, there was hardly a weak portfolio to be seen. This year's winner was another Finn, Harri Palviranta, who explored the propensity toward alcohol-fuelled violence that marks weekend nights in Finland. His body of work, "Beaten People" (2006), is a remarkable, almost Weegee-esque documentation of bloodied heads and battered bodies.

Finally, this year's Rencontres d'Arles, although very much adrift in its middle age, was still able to produce one or two surprises. Massive shows of work from China and India attempted to wrestle diverse artistic approaches under the rubric of "national identity" with results that are more a testament to political character than to any particular artistic genre or sensibility. The Chinese show featuring artists of the Dashanzi Art District in central Beijing was about explosive art ideas that might be expected from artists largely freed from censorship, and now encountering the world marketplace. The work from India, celebrating sixty years of independence, reflected a struggle with identity, nationalism, family, and self. Works by Dayanita Singh and Nony Singh pointed to a new Indian identity and, like that of Bharat Sikka, addressed the effect of the high-tech economy on Indians of various social levels. Sunil Gupta examined his life as an older AIDS survivor finding love again between India and Montreal in a mix of competing cultural codes. Pablo Bartholemew's retrospective covered the alternative scene of the 1960s and 1970s from the inside: an Indian take on the Indian end of the hippie trail.

Lives on display and the search to construct an identity were featured in both major shows by Alberto Garcia-Alix and in works by the young Finn Johanna Hackman and a Filipino living in Spain, Gianfranco Tripodo (the last two found during the informal reviews of the "Voies Off" (1)). Garcia-Alix, the aging enfant terrible of Spanish photography, has chronicled an eventful life of thirty years of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll in a manner that makes Larry Clark's work seem pedestrian. His imagery is less about show and shock value than pure documentation of a moment. It bears a relationship with Nan Goldin's more intimate mode of telling the story of an intentionally chosen hard life. Hackman's search to find her life in pictures--what she refers to as "Inbetweens"--is extremely personal and fragmentary. Like her mentor Petersen, she combines the dark side of the imagination and imagined experience with images from childhood and attempts to weave a narrative together in a way similar to Hyytiaien but leaves the spaces "inbetween," both temporal and special, to be filled by the viewer's imagination as well as her own.

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The majority of shows reflected a lack of curatorial direction by artistic director Alain Fleischer. The official prizes were incomprehensible with the exception of the Leica European Publishers Award, which went to Paolo Pellegrin for his forthcoming synopsis of the things he has documented over the course of ten years, "As I Was Dying." Of course, the Rencontres are mostly about meeting people and sharing ideas, as there is no better place than Arles to see old friends or make new ones in the salubrious air of the South of France, discuss all things photographic, show work, make deals, and have fun.

Ultimately, this is the function of all such festivals. Yet this year they all seemed marked by photographers displaying their attempts to fashion an identity for themselves in a multivalent world in constant flux. People put on and take off a variety of identities in the course of their lives, and it is the chosen path of some photographers to articulate it.

BILL KOUWENHOVEN is a writer and photographer currently living and working in Berlin and New York City.

NOTES 1. The "Voies Off" is a parallel festival running for twelve years at Arles, but it is on the endangered species list and may be prohibited from taking place next year by the "official" festival. It should be supported as it only complements the official festival and encourages more diversity as well as the possibility for more reviews. For more information, see www.voiesoff.com.

FOR MORE INFORMATION VISIT TRANSPHOTOGRAPHIQUES: WWW.TRANSPHOTOGRAPHIQUES.COM; FOTO FESTIVAL: WWW.FOTOFESTIVAL.COM; PHOTO ESPANA: WWW.PHEDIGITAL.COM; RENCONTRES D'ARLES: WWW.RENCONTRES-ARLES.COM