Spotlight: In Arles, 12 Photographers Consider How Otherness Illuminates Our Sense of Ourselves

Bruno Palisson, *Equanimity 15* (2022). © Bruno Palisson. Courtesy of Art Trope Gallery.

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What You Need to Know: Arles is famously home to Rencontres d’Arles, an annual photography festival founded in 1970 that draws image-lovers to the city every year. The city’s Art Trope Gallery, too, takes photography as its focus, organizing exhibitions of artists who engage with the medium from an experimental perspective. This summer, the gallery is presenting the work of 12 photographers in “Alterity: I Is an Other,“ a thought-provoking show that considers how ideas of difference are instrumental in defining a sense of self.

Norman Reedus, Bloody Portrait Session My Trailer (Made a Mess) (2012). © Norman Reedus. Courtesy of Art Trope Gallery.

Why We Like It: Alterity is defined as the state of being other or different, and in this diverse exhibition, a sense of peculiarity ties the photographs on view together. The show features 10 of the gallery’s artists, as well as two guest artists, the American actor and photographer Norman Reedus and French filmmaker Fabienne Berthaud. The photographic works on view range from landscapes and moody portraits to experimental abstractions; in these pictures, a sense of strangeness emanates not from the subjects themselves, but from the photographers’ approach to the world around them. Maxime Vignaud, for instance, transforms the image of a child standing on the road into an eerie apparition, while Hélène Hubert’s photograph of a ballet costume floating through a swimming pool is filled with narrative possibilities.

Fabienne Berthaud, Sans titre 20 (2020). © Fabienne Berthaud. Courtesy of Art Trope Gallery.

According to the Gallery: “Philosopher Edgar Morin wisely said, ‘But the beauty of love…is to find one’s truth through otherness.’ Indeed, at Art Trope Gallery, we also believe that knowing our deepest selves and our society originates from our discovery of what we regard as different. This cursor, which each human being places according to his life, essentially defines who we are. The exhibition points out how important knowledge of others is to the understanding of the individual self: it is a celebration of accepting ourselves and others.”

Browse works from the exhibition below.