Raphaëlle Peria​’s work at the Cloître Saint-Trophime, curated by Fanny Robin:
Crossing the Missing Fragment (Traversée du fragment manquant)

Peria revisited old photographs from a childhood trip on the canal, remembering the magic of voyaging on the water while surrounded by magnificent trees. Those trees have been afflicted by a fungus and have now withered away; they are only alive in the photographs.

Peria printed the images on large glass plates, scraping lively marks into the foliage. Her engravings activate the scenes, even as they extract away the color. You see all at once, what was there and is no longer there. The glass plates are hung on wooden structures in the center of the room, so viewers can walk around to see both sides, and to see through them, like a double-sided mirror into the abundance of the past.

I chanced into my favorite show of the festival at the Galerie Arena, where Gregory Halpern was tasked to work with Magnum’s color archive in France. A selection from the archive was presented with small magnifiers and an irresistible wall of slides. 

Gregory Halpern​’s Shadow Collection.

With humble curiosity and a kind of reverence, Halpern offered his own personal response to the archive, and to pictures he found in the troves that speak to the act of seeing. Traveling way back to the beginning, he lived for a few days at the house of Nicéphore Niépce, inhabiting the stillness of the place that bore the first image.

It’s the kind of beauty-steeped meditation on perception I only expect to find about once every decade. 

You can see more of this gorgeous show on Magnum’s site. 

(I’m grateful that the winding streets of Arles kept me insatiably wandering through its exhibitions, or I’d have missed this one.)

-Lisa Woodward