Photography’s eternal present at Arles

It’s extraordinary to think that only one Japanese woman has ever been exhibited at Arles before, and that’s the serenely poetic Rinko Kawauchi. And it’s confounding that from a country so rich in photographic tradition, hardly any of the nation’s young women artists have even been exhibited outside the archipelago — an injustice now being corrected, albeit belatedly.

Among those featured, it’s Tokuko who appears to be the more quietly subversive diarist of the seemingly mundane, documenting with precision, for instance, her old fridge and its contents. We learn that the fridge  — a surprise gift from her husband in 1978 after the birth of their daughter — once belonged to occupying American soldiers. And she began photographing this large, noisy appliance and other domestic objects to document her life, before going on to capture other people’s fridges in an act of “serial memorialism.”

It doesn’t take a genius to spot how she’s subtly chronicling oppression by zooming in on the banal.

And then there’s the dreamy, expressionist works of the hugely talented Lieko Shiga, offered almost in contrast. Shiga documented the “Spiral Coast” following the earthquake and tsunami that set in motion the Fukushima disaster. “I believe that photography can capture a dimension of the world that is invisible … I sometimes refer to it as the eternal present,” she says.

Moving on from there to the smaller exhibits focused on individual artists, at the vaulted and crumbling Eglise des Frères Prêcheurs lies the work of former Magnum agency photographer Christine de Middel. Titled “Journey to the Centre,” after the Jules Verne novel “Journey to the Centre of the Earth,” the works here document the migrant trail from Tapachula in southern Mexico to the small town of Felicity, California in the U.S. But this is no catalogue of woe and misery, rather a celebration of unstoppable human optimism.

Chronicling the brave and foolhardy in a joyful tapestry, the collection includes captivating visuals, such as a member of an athletics club practicing the pole vault on the beach next to the border wall. But it’s “Obstacle in the Way,” showing woman in a lake stood in front of a dead tree, peering into the distance at a mountain range, that’s perhaps the most captivating image in all of Arles this year.