Rencontres d’Arles: Toxic futures, shadowy pasts and jolly green dreams

This year’s annual art photography festival leads visitors to spooky subterranean work by Sophie Calle, devastating images of oceans under threat and some gigantic AI vegetables

‘Are you sure?” a man ascending the stairs asks before I venture down into Arles’ ancient cryptoporticus. At the bottom awaits Sophie Calle’s exhibition Neither Give or Throw Away. It’s one of the headline shows of this year’s Rencontres d’Arles photography festival, but I understand what the concerned passerby means. It’s spooky down here in the subterranean chambers, where the semi-dark is permeated only by the stagnant scent of underground damp, and pools of sepia water collect on the dirt floor.

I’ve walked into a funeral for photographs – a final farewell for Calle’s ill-fated series The Blind, when the French artist interviewed people attending an institute for the blind in Paris in 1986. She interviewed 23 individuals of all ages, and the series is composed of Calle’s haunting closeup photo portraits of them, with collections of photographs of the things they describe in text extracts as beautiful – the sea, leopard fur, the colour white, hair, their homes, their mothers. It’s a poetic and, at times, harrowing rumination on vision, and how images are constructed in the mind. But in 2023, the works were damaged after a storm hit Calle’s storeroom, and they became infested with mould spores. So this – at least according to Calle – is to be their final resting place, along with some other works she wasn’t sure what to do with. But in case you’re thinking of taking anything – as the title implies – don’t bother. As Calle warns in an introductory statement: they’re toxic.

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