“Heavy duty and razor sharp” is the slogan for the 41st Rencontres d’Arles, in part a reference to the pink rhino that provides this year’s mascot, but no doubt it’s also meant to imply the new focus on conceptualism – serious and cutting edge? – and the highly visible presence of what we used to term “artists who use photography”. An elephant might have been more appropriate, given the prospect that hangs over the future direction of the festival, and indeed the city itself. Maja Hoffman, whose family made billions in the Swiss chemicals industry and who are surely the city’s most wealthy residents, hopes to begin work on a new Frank Gehry-designed culture park in the near future, in which she’s investing €100m.

Housed on the site of a former railway works, the initiative is bound to transform Arles (quite literally into “the city of images” if Hoffman has her way), which despite its magnificent, UNECSO protected Roman monuments, and its close association with Vincent Van Gogh, has always seemed resistant to mass tourism. Whether this is a good or bad thing for Arles I have no idea, but most places would bite her hand off. For now, the project is dependent on whether she’ll be granted permission to buy the land and build on it, and if she gets a positive, work will begin next year, with a partial opening planned for 2013, and full completion set for 2016.

Under the auspices of the Luma Foundation she founded in 2004, which has been a generous sponsor of the Rencontres Awards, Hoffman is becoming an ever-more important figure in the art world, supporting institutions such as the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Venice Biennale, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, and most recently named a Tate trustee by the Prime Minister. These art-world connections have been brought to bear on this year’s Rencontres, which Brett Rogers, director of The Photographers’ Gallery, rightly described as “a watershed” when I bumped into her in Arles, such is the emphasis on conceptual practice – though it remains to be seen whether this is a new direction, or merely the flavour in favour in 2010.

Luma has staged and sponsored two exhibitions, one featuring Swiss duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss, presenting their monochrome photos of fairground illustrations, which are surprisingly effective once removed from the thrill rides they originally adorned. The other show features Glasgow artist Luke Fowler and his collaboration with the American filmmaker, Peter Hutton. But Hoffman’s influence is most felt in the Discovery Awards, whose 15 solo exhibitions always mark the contemporary pulse of the festival. She was asked to pick this year’s five selectors, and chose members of her “core group” of artists and curators who are helping conceptualise the “utopian” building project in the Pardes Ateliers.

This five – serious heavyweights, including uber-conceptualist Liam Gillick, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist of the Serperntine Gallery – was, one assumes, supposed to shake up photography-world conventions. But very few of them are genuine discoveries, most having already exhibited at major museums, and quite a lot of it is conceptually lightweight – the kind of art that walks the walk, but talks very little. Ambiguity, disassociation and neutrality are common themes, typified by the work of Elad Lassry and Annette Kelm (both selected by Beatrix Ruff, director of the Kunsthalle in Zurich), whose slight and incoherent works include found photos and objects alongside staged tableaux, and are boringly concerned with formal qualities. Marlo Pascual, on the other hand, selected by Gillick, taps into similar material with his photobased sculptures based on amateur images sourced from Ebay, but he enlivens his installations with a sense of theatrical possibility.

Likewise, Anne Collier (chosen by Tom Eccles, from Bard College in New York state), brings a psychological tension to her work based on found imagery, which was missing in much of the other Discoveries – although that’s not a charge with which you could accuse Leigh Ledare. The arch provocateur returns one year after he was the major talking point at last year’s Rencontres (chosen by Nan Goldin for her show, Ca Me Touche), when he presented images of his mother in explicit detail. Mrs Ledare is here again in a short cameo role, but it’s the ex Mrs Ledare – the photographer’s former wife – who has the starring role this time. First he photographed her in various scenarios on a three-day trip to a house in the country, then two months later asked her new husband to do likewise in the same location. Both sets of images are displayed together, with cut-outs from porn magazines and the like, and though the results are not as coherent – or indeed shocking – as last year’s, they certainly get you thinking about the nature of these relationships, and notions of possession and transgression.

In the end, however, the most conventional photographer collected the €25,000 Discovery Prize, voted by the “professionals” who visit during the first week of the festival. That’s not to denigrate Taryn Simon, who is one of the most interesting voices to emerge in the last decade, and here she presents a powerful work, The Innocents, focused on former prisoners in the US who have been wrongly convicted. But I’m perplexed why this work was chosen when it was published seven years ago. For no apparent reason, a new €25,000 prize, the Luma Award, was also chosen, given by Fischli & Weiss to Trisha Donnelly, another conceptualist who likes to “tease the viewer with imitations of meaning”, as Obrist explains it. This will continue in following years, selected by a “world-famous artist” – a move that lends weight to the winner, and patronises the photography professionals at the same time.

So far it sounds like I’m pretty down on this year’s Rencontres. But, bar some of the Discoveries and a few other misses, I felt it the best I’ve seen since Martin Parr guest-curated in 2004 – though for entirely different reasons. While Parr presented a tight edit mostly consisting of little known names that fitted his own vision of conceptual documentary, this year’s festival has no arbiter of taste, and no real theme, yet somehow strikes the right balance with shows that will appeal to both photography connoisseurs and casual visitors holidaying in the area during the exhibition run until 19 September.

There are several unrelated strands to the festival, however, and while the “Rock Trail” sounds like a rather blatant appeal to populism, its key show, I am a cliché, was one of this year’s most pleasant surprises. With its title borrowed from an X-Ray Spex song, and a room at the entrance devoted to album covers by bands such as The Clash, the Sex Pistols and Richard Hell (together with booming soundtrack), you’re left in no doubt punk is at the core of the exhibition. But this is not merely one of the Rencontres’ frequent nostalgic indulgences. The exhibition treats punk, together with its followers and precursors, as a serious artistic force – though not so seriously as to smother the uproarious energy of it all.

Some of the artists included are no-brainers, such as Dennis Morris’ images of the Pistols on tour, and Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests for the five members of the Velvet Underground. But the exhibition brilliantly weaves in more conceptual work, such as Dan Graham’s Rock My Religion and Christian Marclay’s sonic masterpiece, Guitar Drag, together with collage and cut-ups from Jamie Reid, Destroy All Monsters and Linder, and the more personally driven photography of the likes of Wolfgang Tillmans and Peter Hujar. Such eclecticism, pulled together with an easy coherence, yet without any apparent overcontrivance, points to the work of a curator of supreme confidence. Emma Lavigne, curator of contemporary art at the Musée
National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou, clearly has a track record, and having previously put together shows for the Cité de la Musique in Paris, she seemed destined to do this show.

Another strand of the festival is the film photography trail, which features eight exhibitions shown around both the old town centre and the railway sheds, including a tribute to the Polaroid, a reassessment of colour pioneer Ernst Haas, seen through his more personal work, and everybody’s hit of the festival – Shoot! It’s based on a largely forgotten fairground attraction – a shooting gallery where visitors would fire an air rifle at a target, which would trigger a camera if they hit the bullseye and deliver up a portrait – that has been recreated for the festival. I went along with London-based photographer Toby Smith, who’s ex-Army, and he scored three out of three, while I took four shots and got none…

It’s accompanied by a new classic in Erik Kessels’ series of found photography collections, titled In almost every picture, this time featuring Ria van Dijk at one of the few surviving photo-shooting galleries, captured hitting the bull across the space of eight decades. Further images show French artists and personalities shooting their auto-portraits over the years – including Simone de Beauvoir accompanied by Jean-Paul Sartre, Man Ray with Lee Miller, and Henri Cartier-Bresson and friends – plus another terrific piece by Christian Marclay, Crossfire, a fourscreen installation that assaults you from all sides with gun-toting movie clips from Westerns, war films and gangster flicks and a cacophony of sound.

Also worth mentioning on the film trail are Michel Campeau’s images of photographic darkrooms, whose tattered functionality takes on a strange melancholic beauty in his pictures, and Zhang Dali’s before and after shots of doctored Chinese propaganda photographs, showing the fake and a print from the original negative side-by-side. Elsewhere, a celebration of art and photography from Argentina (to coincide with its bicentennial) largely disappointed, although it was fun seeing Léon Ferrari’s rabidly anti-clerical collages and sculptural pieces displayed in a church.

In the enigmatically titled changeover trail, two exhibitions stood out (besides Regeneration, which featured in last month’s issue), including Paolo Woods’ Walk on my eyes, an insightful portrait based project on individual Iranians, designed to show that they “can be surprising, droll, audacious and dissatisfied – not the homogenous mass the regime [or the West] would like us to believe”. The other is Crossways, an exhibition featuring work from the private collection of Marin Karmitz – best known in France for setting up a film production company and a chain of cinemas – which includes both conceptualists and documentarists. Brilliantly curated by Christian Cajoulle, and shown in a cavernous church space, the exhibitions features such unlikely bedfellows as Christer Strömholm, Annette Messenger, Abbas Kiarostami and Antoine d’Agata.

That such mix of different approaches should come as a surprise says something about how photography is still seen and appropriated in the art world. But it also serves as an answer to the medium’s critics, who often argue that photography is inherently generic. Photography, like contemporary art and any other medium you care to mention, has its own series of traps and deadends. But perhaps it’s about time we stopped beating ourselves up about that and got out of the bunker mentality that pitches one approach against the other. So yes, let’s welcome the newfound focus on the conceptual, but not without forgetting that ideas aren’t the sole preserve of process-driven artwork, and that relevance, content and communication are worthy vices.
Exhibitions continue until 19 September

Photo España
The Spanish capital offers a very different interpretation of the photo festival, delivering museum-quality shows based around a more overtly intellectual premise, which run over a period of seven weeks (this year it was 09 June to 25 July) alongside a programme of activities, including an excellent portfolio review, with no particular focus point. That’s to say that, unlike Arles, no one week serves as a festival meeting point, so Photo España is perhaps more comparable to the format of the art biannual, with its focus on the thematic structure of the exhibitions themselves.

While many photographers visit Arles for its networking opportunities, a weekend (at a push) in Madrid offers the chance to see as many high-quality shows you would see in Britain in a year. What’s more, you’ll get a more thoroughly thought-provoking overview of the medium, greater creative vim about the curation, and due to the quick and constant turnaround of the annual programme, a better insight into contemporary practice. Above all, Madrid has the most extraordinary venues, from world-famous museums such as the Reina Sofía, to more unconventional spaces like the recently rehabilitated slaughterhouses at the Matadero. And two of the most spectacular spaces include the Teatro Fernán Gómez, with its 2000 meter-square, single-floor exhibition hall, ideal for large-scale group shows and retrospectives – and best of all, the Canal Isabel II, a former water storage tank designed in the early 20th century, whose four floors are built onto a vertiginous system of metal ladders and runways, topped by a large fully spherical dome.

The latter hosts some particularly gory images this year, which have been dividing audiences prepared to make the short trip out of the city centre, but Love & Ecstasy was without doubt my standout show from this year’s Photo España. Having smuggled herself into Iraq, Isabel Muñoz somehow managed to photograph the private rituals of an ascetic Sufi sect, whose self-mutilation rituals make for eye-watering contemplation. Presented in almost pornographic detail, the large format colour pictures are nonetheless beautiful, and the parallels with Catholicism and rituals of the Christian faith are made apparent in the photography’s reference to Spanish religious painting of the 17th century, particularly one image that depicts a dagger gouged into a foot. But this was much more than an impressive set of photographs, because they were brought together as a sitespecific installation that used the former water tower to stunning effect, curated by Christian Cajoulle and realised by acclaimed Spanish architect, Blanca Lleó.

Picked out in chiaroscuro spotlight from the dark of the windowless space, the photographs ascended the tower in a journey that referenced the same search for spiritual purity sought by the men in the pictures, as they seek to transcend earthly concerns for the body in order to come closer to God. The pictures of self-mutilation on the lower floors give way to those of another Sufi practice, the whirling dervish. And as you looked up to the bottom of the dome at the top of the tower, the blurred image of one of the dancers – shot from above – is projected in twirling animation. Inside the dome, screened in 180° panorama, Muñoz created the most spectacular, artful video sequences depicting a relatively new phenomena – female dervishes, dressed in blood red robes, spinning up to a point at which they reach a point of ecstasy and stretch out to receive the grace of Allah. These photographs will be shown in other venues, but surely nowhere else will derive the same dramatic impact. In fact, the whole project has a sense of destiny about it. Despite the inherent danger of smuggling herself into the men-only rituals – which Cajoulle claims have never before been photographed by a non-believer – Muñoz says that when she arrived, they appeared to be waiting for her all along.

This year the festival's overall theme was Time, put together by Sérgio Mah, who completes the last of his three years as the festival’s general curator, having previously explored concept of Place (2008), and The Everyday (2009). “The origin of each photograph always includes the ‘here and now’ of its gestation,” writes Mah. “We can never forget that, whether in a more spontaneous or a more calculated manner, the photographic act was an event – it simply happened.” The theme is explored in some obvious ways, others less so. The “photographic act” – a split-second happening – is best encapsulated in the work of Harold Edgerton, the professor of electronic engineering who became interested in the scientific applications of photography in the 1930s.

Best known for his freeze-frame action images using the strobe lighting tools he pioneered – such as Milk Drop Coronet (1957) and Bullet Through Apple (1964) – Edgerton, like Eadweard Muybridge before him, transformed our perception of motion. He captured “the shape of time”, as Mah describes it, adding that his fascination with the MIT professor is at the point where he was no longer just conducting research, he was experimenting at the border of art and science. (If you’re in Birmingham this summer, you can see his work at an exhibition at Unit 39-40 in the Pallasades Shopping Centre, which runs until 05 September.)

The temporal nature of the art of Oscar Muñoz, who creates photographic-style line reliefs from ephemeral materials such as chocolate, makes for another obvious inclusion. I’d always seen this as something of a gimmick until his show at Photo España, which included video and installation, highlighting the most contemplative aspects of the Colombian artist’s work. In one of the more playful pieces, a self-portrait floats on water in a sink, slowly dissolving down the plug hole, and in a better known work, the images appear fleetingly on pieces of tin, only rendered viewable when you breathe onto the surface, before they disappear again in an instant.

Video has been more widely shown at the festival during Mah’s time as curator, and this year there was another fascinatingly provocative work in the basement space of the Circulo Bellas Artes. Fernando Sánchez Castillo’s latest work, Tactic, touches on recent Spanish history and the legacy of General Franco. Only now are the wounds of division caused by the Civil War being properly re-examined in Spain, and Castillo cleverly captures a sense of taboo in his film, which includes blind people carefully examining a waxwork of the dictator with their hands. Despite the innocence of the premise, there’s something delightfully dangerous and sacrilegious about it. Roman Signer’s videos, shown at the Matadero, also had a sense of naughtiness about them. The Swiss artist’s filmed performances with fire and explosives have the feel of pseudo-scientific experiments, but they reminded me of childhood dares, enlargened and surreal.

There were also two magnificent retrospectives in Madrid, including an insightful overview of the multidisciplinary work of Lászlo Moholy-Nagy. Drawn from a great many collections from around the world, and including painting, sculpture, books and rayograms alongside photographs of a more documentary nature, they amply demonstrate the Hungarian artist’s hunger to create was not entirely devoted to formal experiments. There was another kind of magic at work at Helen Levitt’s exhibition, which included some 140 prints spanning her seven decade career from the 1930s. In her early photographs of boys and girls playing on the dirty streets of Manhattan – surely the most perfectly encapsulated images of childhood anyone has ever managed to capture – you see the positive antithesis of Francis Ford Coppola’s New York. Very much a humanistic viewer, she captures the theatre of the streets, and a surprisingly easy interracial mix, both in stills and some wonderful film work, which celebrate the city and the character of its people.

New York is also the focus of one of two major group shows, Mixed Use, Manhattan, shown at the Reino Sofia. The title refers to a developers’ term for buildings used for both commercial and residential purposes, the kind of dilapidated places artists took during the recession years of the 1970s, and which became the backdrop to their work and performances. Some of the work here was a touch too art school, but Peter Hujar’s images of the Westside best captured the curator’s intentions.

The other large group exhibition, Between Times, shown at the Teatro Fernán Gómez, explored the thematic overview through the recent work of 17 contemporaries, including Jeff Wall, Erwin Wurm and Hiroshi Sugimoto, and from the UK Clare Strand, Steven Pippin and Tacita Dean. The latter’s work stood out for me, particularly her black-and-white photo-engravings, The Russian Ending, which refers to a phase in early Danish cinema when filmmakers would create two endings to a movie: a happy one for American audiences, and a tragedy for the Russians.
 
And lastly, I enjoyed Juergen Teller’s show, Calves & Thighs, with which he paid tribute to the woman who really made his career, his agent Katy Baggott, who died earlier this year. I must admit that I’ve never been much of a fan of his work, which always seemed too slight and flippant in book form. But with all his various works brought together in one place, it kind of makes sense. For a start, you really get to appreciate Teller as a photographer, but also, you get the sense that he’s actually got a take on contemporary culture, and in particular the way so many people live their private lives in public nowadays. He captures a sense of hysteria – the collision of art, fashion and celebrity – and lets you have your own take on it. Some will be repulsed, others amused, and no doubt many will find the many sightings of the German photographer’s cock a genuine cause for celebration. It could even be a Sign of the Times for the Noughties generation. BJP