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The Rencontres d’Arles Photo Festival very sadly announced yesterday that this year’s edition is cancelled and will not take place, so we thought this week we would bring a bit of Arles to you.
Atlas Gallery is offering for the very first time a group of rare and important vintage prints by the co-founder of Les Rencontres d’Arles, Lucien Clergue, from the series Camargue Secrète. The prints are all hand-glazed and are simply sublime objects, rich with the atmosphere of the Camargue and printed by Clergue himself in his darkroom in Arles. Please let us know if you wish to see them in the flesh and we’ll be happy to organise a video-view for you.
In the swamps of Arles stretches out the land of the beyond. It is this Secret Camargue that the artist reveals to us through a light that he makes his own.
Lucien Clergue practises reading in these landscapes the signs that make up the rice paddies, swamp seaweed, triumphant maize leaves, vines flooded in winter or the sleeping pond whose somewhat mystic nature he knows how to enumerate.
In a sky washed by the wind, the process of organic life is born in every instant and organises itself in a winegrower’s delirium.
Between the wanderings of the Rhone we find the Vaccares, the Delta and its silt, the beauty of the reeds, the expanses of salt, the violence of the cracked earth — generous nature on which the artist feeds, out of sight of the common eye. True poetry in its deepest sense is here installed.