See to not believe: when photography stops being evidence and becomes fiction
From photos of supposed UFOs to the unsettling scenes of Park Chan-wook, going through the rediscovery of Martine Barrat and the visual culture of African independences, the Arles Encounters explore the diffuse frontier between document and construction.
The whale lies on a blue canvas, at the foot of a truck loaded with ice. It seems a banal scene in any Korean market, until it takes on a genre film air: there are traces of blood on the animal and its pale body, defeated on the asphalt, prints a mute violence on the image. It's not strange that behind the camera is Park Chan-wook, the masterful director of Oldboy and Decision to Leave, who for the first time in Europe exposes his facet as a photographer, crossed by that mixture of the everyday and the ominous that also characterizes his cinema.
In his images, a bouquet of flowers seems to suffocate inside a plastic cover. The hand of a mannequin emerges from a radiator. And it's enough to squint for a row of closed parasols to become an unsettling procession of ghosts.
Translated by urgent.news. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
