Arles (AFP)

Fifty years after their creation by photographer Lucien Clergue, museum curator Jean-Maurice Rouquette and writer Michel Tournier, the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles opened Monday with 50 exhibitions and a tribute to their three founders .

For this "happy birthday", according to the formula of their director Sam Stourdzé, the Rencontres present the work begun on their archives, some 3,300 works collected for half a century. Among the images on display are photos of Robert Doisneau, Martine Franck, a famous photo of Dali in the water of Jean Dieuzaide, the mustache wrapped in a ribbon, or the covers of the 50 catalogs of the event.

It is Lucien Clergue, Arlesian of always, who had the idea: to ask each invited artist to give to the Meetings one or more of his works.

It was he who had the idea of ​​giving an international aura to the Rencontres by bringing in the first American photographers. 50 years later, the organizers pay tribute to the first guest, Edward Weston. An exhibition identical to that of his coming, with his famous black and white shots of landscapes, nudes and still lifes, paralleled with the very first works of Lucien Clergue, also black and white.

The 50 years are also celebrated, at Parc des Ateliers, the old warehouses of the SNCF bought by the Luma Foundation, by the presentation of 50 books of the library of the British photographer Martin Parr acquired by the foundation of the patron Maja Hoffmann.

The photo art coexists for this edition with the documentary photo. The space Van Gogh welcomes the American photographer Helen Levitt (1913-2009), photographer of the underprivileged districts of New York and Mexico, for the first time exposed to Arles.

In the Cruise area, photos of reports, commissioned by the Vichy regime during the Second World War, testify to the habitat in "the zone", a space where accumulated, beyond the Paris ring, a multitude barracks, built by the inhabitants themselves, from recycled materials. The photographer Eugène Atget was the first to be interested before the Hungarian André Kertesz.

Also unpublished photographs of the German photographer Germaine Krull (1897-1985) taken during a crossing Marseille-Rio, in 1941, and found in the family of the director Olivier Assayas.

? 2019 AFP