Share your interactive ePaper on all platforms and on your website with our embed function. This pitching together of different photographic practices andaesthetics may shock some professionals, but it has won favour with a very wide public. The magnitude of this cultural event is also a sign of the growing importance of creative photography at a timewhen everybody in the world seems to have become a photographer.
Everybody rubs shoulders withthe same enthusiasm. Putting the programme for Arles together each year is a complex undertaking, a kind of alchemy that has not alittle of the collage about it, the subtlety of haute cuisine allied to a sense of showmanship. My Ministry supportsand acknowledges their perseverance with wholehearted enthusiasm. Withoutthem, such a wide array of styles and genres of photography could never have been covered. It is a subject to whichI am particularly attached; learning about images is an important aspect of it.
I take this opportunity of paying my respects to him and expressing my support for thework of modernisation and cultural development that he has set in train. In this respectit is a major cultural event and is fully in line with the guidelines that I prescribed for the photographic missionthat was set up at my initiative within the Ministry.
Remember that in the survival of this great, thirty-year-old project, seemed very much in doubt. Without atop to bottom redefinition of the principles, format and concept of the whole, our prospects seemed grim indeed. I, a new recruit to this adventure, am committed to paying homage to these two men for thissuccess. A new policy of artistic programming was set up, centred around a number of grand prizes for photography,awarded annually; these have flourished thanks to the increasingly generous support of Maja Hoffmann, whohas recently returned to Arles.
The Discovery Award, created to unearth new talent, stimulates a diversity ofviewpoints on artistic creation, thanks in particular to a regular shuffling of jury members. Working on the sameprinciple, a succession of experts and curators, changing from year to year, vary the programme think of thecollaboration of such prestigious figures as Martin Parr in , Raymond Depardon in , Christian Lacroix in or Nan Goldin in , thus avoiding the risk of a tunnel-vision that would shut off the festival to the greatvariety of available talent.
