In Arles, Cartographies of the Faraway

A bare-chested horseman in a straw hat leads his mount past a curtain of palm trees. In the distance, a plume of black smoke rises from a blazing oil well. Bahia, 1961. The photograph does not say who caused the fire, or why the man keeps walking without looking back: it simply shows a world on fire while life, around him, goes on. Marie-Claude Deffarge and Gordian Troeller photographed more than fifty countries this way, never trying to make the view comfortable.

The duo formed in 1948, in Amsterdam, one evening when a flamenco act was performing in a bar. Marie-Claude Deffarge, then a student at the Sorbonne, was researching a thesis on Spanish dance; Gordian Troeller, a Luxembourg-born press correspondent freshly expelled from Spain after three months in prison for helping an opponent of the Franco regime escape, fell in love that same night. Eleven years later, the couple joined the German weekly Stern. The division of labor was clear: she prepared each departure, he filmed and narrated as he walked. “I like to linger over people, over their faces,” he would later say.

“The more we observe other societies, the more respect we have for them,” Troeller said. Reporting alone did not hold their interest for long: starting in the 1970s, through contact with French economist François Partant, whose doubts about Western models of development matched their own, Deffarge and Troeller turned to documentary film. This gave rise to In the Name of Progress, Planet of Women, and later Children of the World, some thirty films broadcast in primetime on German public television.

She died in 1984, near Paris; he died in 2003 in Hamburg. Their archive now belongs to the Museum Folkwang in Essen, and it is from there that this photograph of Tanzanian women poring over a literacy pamphlet, 1965, taken from a report on women’s condition worldwide, has traveled to Arles. The exhibition, co-produced with Luxembourg’s National Audiovisual Center, is accompanied by a book published in 2024, Stern-Reportagen und Filme [Stern Reports and Films], a belated but necessary rediscovery.

In the same Maison des Peintres, one room over, Orianne Ciantar Olive sets out from another war, with an entirely different method. In 2019, the Marseille-based photographer, born in 1981, set out to reach Syria by following the old Beirut-Damascus railway line, destroyed during the Lebanese civil war. She would never cross the border. To avoid being taken for a spy in this high-tension zone, she traveled under three different identities, before turning south, toward the separation wall at Kfar Kila, chosen by Israel in 2012 as the site for the first stones of a border with Lebanon.

“I started questioning my medium to bring out new contours of history,” she explained in 2024, shortly before setting out on this journey. From that undertaking came a gesture as simple as it was radical: “I had already turned the words around; I ended up turning my film around too,” she recalls, describing a view of the port of Beirut taken from her window.

Lebanon becomes “Nabil,” an anagram and a reversal. The cardinal points are inverted, the sun’s path hypothetically displaced. The principle is not metaphorical: it engages the very matter of the images. The film is loaded backwards into the camera, the shots made on its reverse side, without emulsion, in direct contact with the base, producing red and orange, almost solar tones, in which the other side of a story can be read in negative.

The title is borrowed from Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges and his short story about a dreamer who discovers, in the end, that he himself is being dreamed by another; the writings of Mahmoud Darwich and Etel Adnan run through the series, whose spiraling structure makes its sequences answer each other in mirror image, around a central star: the sun, at once a visual motif and a conceptual device, the very sun of which La Rochefoucauld once wrote that it “cannot be looked at directly,” any more than death can.

The resulting book, published by Dunes Éditions in 2024 with support from the Cnap and Les Filles de la Photo, brings together 74 photographs and nine poems written by the artist herself. Neither quite document nor quite fiction, The Circular Ruins moves front-side reversed, as if to better reveal the underside of a disaster the right side could not tell.

A few streets away, the Espace Monoprix no longer sells air conditioners: it exhibits 100 images chosen from the 1,800 prints the Fnac has gathered since 1978, now held at the Musée Nicéphore Niépce in Chalon-sur-Saône. “It’s one of the largest corporate collections there is,” says Aurélie de Lanlay, deputy director of the Rencontres. Committed to photography from its very beginnings, the retail chain built, without ever making a show of it, one of the most important corporate photography collections in France.

Jair Lanes, Sophie, Ubatuba, Brazil, 2000

Claudine Doury, Little Vera, Lake Baikal, Siberia, 1998

Françoise Huguier, Nenets reindeer herd, Yamal Peninsula, Yar-Sale, Siberia, 1992

To give it a thread, in a move to break down the boundaries of photography, the curators brought in writer Nathacha Appanah, winner of the 2025 Prix Femina. She does not comment on the photographs, she inhabits them: “What are the stories that photos tell made of?” she asks at the outset, before wondering whether they might be patiently waiting “for us to finally find how they resemble us.” Text and images speak to each other, intertwine, sometimes collide.

From the Nenets reindeer herds Françoise Huguier followed in Siberia, to the twins Cristina García Rodero captured in Galicia, to the room where Santu Mofokeng lets a chicken and a bicycle drift by in South Africa, to little Vera, whom Claudine Doury photographed twirling on the shores of Lake Baikal, to the golden silhouette Jair Lanes all but erases on a beach in Ubatuba, Brazil: the collection forms, in the words of its curator Fannie Escoulen, a “sensitive cartography of the world,” each image carrying the photographer’s own experience and their wish to find, elsewhere, another way of being oneself.

Around these lesser-known names orbit the major signatures the Fnac has supported, without ever exhibiting them, for decades: Cartier-Bresson, Depardon, Salgado, Willy Ronis, Josef Koudelka. Nothing in the hang sets them apart by prestige: the staging, built from movement and rupture, blends eras and reputations into a single crossing.

Next stop, the Commanderie Sainte-Luce, a former residence of the Knights of Malta now an annex of the Musée Réattu. Bruno Boudjelal hangs Goudron: Tangier-Cape Town there (goudron, French for tar, is the word used across French-speaking Africa for any paved road), a journey up the African continent that he sums up this way: “Following the tar takes a long time, which lets you live the situations crossed and the exchanges with fellow travelers more intensely.”

The project was born in 2001, in Bamako, his first encounter with the continent; it continued in 2003 in Gabon, where his wife took him to the places of her childhood. “The impressions I felt there are far removed from the images that circulate about this continent: it is neither the exotic, picturesque Africa nor the Africa of suffering,” he says, before describing his photographs as “impressions and improvisations.”

Bruno Boudjelal, Accra, Ghana, 2005

Bruno Boudjelal, Brazzaville, Congo, 2008

Along the way, he meets a Ghanaian man who works in Dakar and is heading home to see his family, a Gambian man who left to look for work in the mines of Angola, a Rwandan man who thought he would find a job in Senegal before giving up and returning to Congo. Far from the single narrative of poverty pushing people toward Europe, Boudjelal finds African journeys that stay African, south-south, at the height of a person rather than the height of a border.

“For me, the artistic experience is spiritual,” Bruno Boudjelal says: an encounter between an outer landscape and an inner life, in which the French-Algerian artist finds, without having looked for it, an extension of his own history on the other side of the Mediterranean. The exhibition, accompanied by a book published this year by Atelier EXB, continues into the hall of the Avignon TGV train station.

To close the walk, one must leave the city walls and reach the Abbaye de Montmajour, a few kilometers from Arles, where Anne-Lise Broyer shows Mediterranean. Is This Where We Once Lived?.

It all begins in Carthage, in 2017. “I had images in my head that reminded me of a film I had loved,” she recalls: Méditerranée, by Jean-Daniel Pollet, a 1963 filmic poem built on texts by Philippe Sollers. The exhibition’s title is drawn from it almost word for word.

For more than 20 years, Anne-Lise Broyer has tied photography to literature, publishing books with Pierre Michon, Bernard Noël, and Jean-Luc Nancy in which the image is born out of reading. She reworks some of her silver prints with graphite pencil, seeking a zone of disturbance between eye and hand. Applied here to Mediterranean landscapes, this gesture further blurs the line between document and memory.

Anne-Lise Broyer, Port of Beirut, Lebanon, 2022

Anne-Lise Broyer, Sidi Bou Saïd, Tunisia, 2024 | Tipaza, Algeria, 2022

Since then, the photographer has been making her way around the Mediterranean rim, from Algiers to Beirut, from Tipasa to Baalbek, by way of Pompeii and Marseille. “The ruin is not just a subject to photograph for me, but a modus operandi for the medium itself,” she said in 2022, just as she was beginning this crossing, which she describes elsewhere as a photographic song, an elegy composed in verses.

In one diptych, she pairs Sidi Bou Saïd, in Tunisia, with the fallen columns of Tipasa, in Algeria; elsewhere, she photographs the gutted silos of the port of Beirut, three years after the explosion that disfigured the city. The images, developed in a muted gray, never try to date their ruins: whether ancient or recent, in Beirut as in Pompeii, they carry the same question, the one filmmaker Jean-Daniel Pollet had asked before her: is this where we once lived?

Follow the “Traversées” (Crossings) trail at the Rencontres d’Arles:

· “No Pictures to Dream Of: Reportages and Documentaries for Stern”, Marie-Claude Deffarge & Gordian Troeller, Maison des Peintres.

· “The Circular Ruins”, by Orianne Ciantar Olive, Maison des Peintres.

· “Our Faraway Dreams. A Look at the Fnac Photography Collection”, Espace Monoprix.

· “Goudron: Tangier-Cape Town”, by Bruno Boudjelal, Commanderie Sainte-Luce.

· “Mediterranean. Is This Where We Once Lived?” (Anne-Lise Broyer), Abbaye de Montmajour.

July 6 – October 4, 2026.