Cultural meeting
Meeting with French photographer Babette Mangolte in Arles
Audio 02:23
Babette Mangolte exhibits at the international photography meetings in Arles.
© Edmond Sadaka / RFI
By: Edmond Sadaka
3 mins
The
Rendez-vous culture
takes us to Arles, in the south of France, where the 53rd International Photography Meetings will continue until September 25.
No less than 40 exhibitions are on the program.
On the bill, there is in particular the French experimental photographer and filmmaker Babette Mangolte.
Aged 81 today, she is known in particular for her shots of dancing in New York in the 1970s. Her photos are exhibited around the theme “Capturing movement in space”.
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Babette Mangolte met the greatest American choreographers and directors in the United States.
It all started for her in the early 1970s, when this theater enthusiast, fresh out of the prestigious Louis Lumière school in Paris, moved to New York, where she still lives.
Since then, she has continued to explore space and time, movement, rhythm and the choreography of bodies.
She also remembers perfectly the moment when she made the choice to document, through her photos, the New York choreographic scene.
She tells us:
“
I started relating to photography as a creative act when I met Richard Foreman.
The first time I saw his piece, I said to myself, I know how to photograph, I don't need to listen to the dialogue.
It was so visual.
There were very few people looking at his pieces, I said to myself: "I'm going to take pictures of something that nobody sees, but in twenty years, they will have a purpose."
This is where I felt like a photographer
”.
What is so remarkable in the work of Babette Mangolte is her way of perceiving and transmitting movement through the image.
This requires not being surprised and anticipating, as the curator of the exhibition Maria Ines Rodrigues explains: "
She sees the pieces two, three times, before starting to photograph them, so she understands what is going on there, what is the context, how is the stage, who are all the dancers and actors.
It is the whole context that interests him
”.
In 50 years of career, Babette Mangolte has therefore been able to immortalize the creations of artists such as Trisha Brown, Richard Foreman, Simon Forti, or Robert Morris, and many other artists.
The exhibition devoted to him in Arles at the Sainte-Anne chapel has been divided into eight distinct parts.
“
We wanted to use the architecture of the church, made up of eight chapels and a choir.
We said to ourselves that we were going to allocate one chapel per choreographer.
For the artists who have worked together, Babette wanted to re-establish links, which is why some chapels bring together two choreographers.
Obviously, Tisha Brown, with whom she has collaborated the most, is in the choir
”, specifies Maria Ines Rodrigues.
Babette Mangolte was presented during the opening week of the Arles festival with the prestigious
Women in Motion
prize awarded annually since 2019 to highlight women photographers.
Babette Mangolte's exhibition
is on view until September 25 at the Sainte-Anne church in downtown Arles.
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