Arles dressed up for the summer

Tag : Chrome Mannequins
 The two fashion-based exhibitions I enjoyed most are worlds apart.The first features Tim Walker's elaborate fairy-tale tableaux whichmerge high fashion and high concept to surreal effect. Everythinghere is otherworldly, from the knitted cars to the giantaccessories, and he invests the images with a definably Englishsense of whimsical humour that is often missing from this kind ofstaged photography. A few streets away, in the Espace Van Gogh, aretwo walls of Sabine Weiss's images from the 1950s of windowdisplays at the Printemps department store in Paris. Mannequinsstare blankly from beneath polka-dotted parasols, or sit mutebeneath baroque chandeliers. This is fashion as public spectacle,tantalisingly out of reach of most passers-by.

In the same space, Olivier Saillard, who curates fashionexhibitions at the wonderful Musée des Arts Decoratifs inParis, has put together a show of copyright registrationphotographs, basically black-and-white images of designs made bythe greats of French fashion, the likes of Madame Vionnet, PaulPoiret and Elsa Schiaparelli. It's a simple, enchanting show thathighlights the art of fashion by concentrating on the designsthemselves rather than the image-makers. The V&A should snap it up.
Elsewhere, this year's Rencontres was a mixed bag that never quitelived up to its promise. Tuesday night's projection in the epicsetting of the Roman amphitheatre was devoted to the work ofFrançoise Hugier, now a French national treasure. Spanningseveral decades and styles, from reportage to fashion, it wouldhave benefited from better editing and, as is often the case here,it was accompanied by a musical soundtrack that seemed designed tolend gravitas to images already laden with meaning and metaphor. Inever want to see another representation of the 'otherness' ofAfrica or 'exoticness' of Asia as long as I live.

That same evening, Jacob Aue Sobol, whose book Sabine I championedin these pages a few years back, won a Leica award for his grainyreportage from Japan, although to me the images seemed a little tooredolent of the work of Anders Pedersen, one of his inspirations.On the edge of town, in the vast spaces known as the Parcs desAteliers, Lacroix's selections were more to my liking. PierreGonnord's giant portraits of people who live 'on the fringes of theestablished order' in Madrid were both powerful and tender, andbrought to mind the work of Caravaggio in their composition andlighting. These faces stayed in my head for hours afterwards.

Likewise, but for different reasons, the portraits of South AfricanPieter Hugo, whose series The Hyena and Other Men is by turnsstartling and disturbing. Hugo spent months with a group ofitinerant wild animal trainers, their children, hyenas and monkeys,in an urban settlement beneath a motorway in Lagos. The resultsredefine reportage and, when the initial shock of these oftencommunal portraits subsides, will make you ponder questions ofanthropology, society, belonging and family. This is powerful and,even on repeated viewing, unsettling work.

Also in the 'Discovery' section, I was much taken with the work ofNew Yorker Ethan Levitas and Londoner Nigel Shafran who bothpresent understated images that possess a quiet cumulative power.Shafran's subject is his wife and son, and their domestic routine,but underlying that is a quest for the sense of order that holds atbay the creeping chaos of the everyday. This is difficult, elusiveterritory but Shafran, who walked away from a budding career as astyle photographer, tackles it with a concentration evident inthese intriguing images, the best of which capture the moments ofquiet reverie we all experience without our even noticing them.