Why Christian Lacroix? I'll be the first to admit I had low expectations of this year's Rencontres d'Arles, given that a fashion designer not widely known for his close attention to photography had been chosen as its guest curator. In many respects I was wrong. Lacroix has, of course, worked with many photographers in the course of his career, but evidently his interest in the medium stretches much wider than professional association. And, given that the photography world has come in for a lot of self-scrutiny of late, anyone who can shed a little outside light on its treasures should be welcomed, right?
In fact, Lacroix's return as 'prodigal son' to the town where he was born and bred is a surprise success, and for perhaps the first time in its 40-year history, the townsfolk of Arles have embraced the festival as their own. For some that will be achievement enough, but for the international photography crowd, which descends during 'Professional Week' at the start of July, expectations are higher - especially as the Rencontres hasn't scored a real critical success since Martin Parr's stint as guest curator in 2004.
Many seemed determinedly unconvinced, but their worst fears - that 'Lacroix darling' and his entourage would overrun the festival with gaudy glamour - were not realised.
As the designer notes in the catalogue's foreword, 'Those expecting a "fashionista" festival will feel justifiably disappointed.' Yes, fashion imagery abounds, and the boy-from-Arles connection is milked to the max, but Lacroix is also generous and eclectic in his choice of exhibitions. Some of it, particularly work commissioned by the fashion industry through magazines and catwalk reportage, doesn't have much relevance beyond its original use, but mostly he's selected photography that transcends its commerial context.
There's space for old and new, with the big guns - including Richard Avedon, Peter Lindbergh and Paolo Roversi - shown together with relative newcomers, the most impressive of whom are Tim Walker and Gregoire Alexandre, whose work is more playfully inventive than their forebears. There are also some superb archive exhibitions, including one dedicated to the history of the fashion video, which showcases some wonderfully surreal footage from the 1960s commissioned by Dim Dam Dom, who gave early opportunities to upcoming directors such as Peter Knapp, as well as photographers like David Bailey and Jeanloup Sieff.
But what there isn't, which is surprising for a fashion designer, is any commitment to the 'now'. There's no sense that Lacroix has looked for the cutting edge in photography, if it exists, in search of the work we'll want to see more of in the future. And this highlights the problem with the Rencontres, which in recent years has seemed to find it difficult to balance populist shows that will benefit the town's tourist industry with the demands of the thousands of visitors who come during Professional Week to see something new.
It appears that the festival is increasingly split in two, with the blockbuster names shown alongside the big historical exhibitions in the old town where the tourists go, and the more contemporary work shown on the edge of Arles at the rejuvenated railway workshops, know as 'Les Ateliers'. And if plans to create a new culture park around the former SNCF sheds, based on designs drawn up by Frank Gehry and supported by the Arles-based LUMA Foundation, that distinction may prove sensible.
There's no obvious theme to Lacroix's selected exhibitions, but his fascination with dress as an expression of code and identity comes through, particularly in the first of the Ateliers, where Charles Freger's series on ceremonial guardsmen is displayed alongside Vanessa Winship's portraits of Turkish schoolgirls. They use a similar method, photographing their subjects in repeated formal poses, seemingly identical in their uniform clothing. Closer inspection reveals untold details through their emblematic embroideries, most evident in the military pomp of Freger's motif-laden liveries, but more subtly transposed in the 'sweet nothings' sewn into the girls' bodices captured by Winship.
Freger began his Empire series with the Royal Grenadier Guards at Wellington Barracks, continuing with the royalist garb of regiments in Norway, Belgium and Spain, together with the republican outfits of France, Greece and Portugal - uniforms that date back to Napoleonic times, an era of intense jingoism, war and nation-building in Western Europe. Although the guardsmen and women are shot encyclopaedically, in situ at their barracks in strictly prescribed poses denoting their symbolic functions, it's the faces that draw you in - vulnerable expressions that normally go unnoticed, sublimated by the histories and ideologies of the military heritage.
Winship's schoolgirls, shot in monochrome, seem to occupy a very different world from the colour and splendour of posturing army protocol, but they are no less proud to wear their uniforms. Captured on their way to class, sometimes for the first time, their dresses embroidered with lace, flowers and charming little messages are also emblematic of disputed territory. Photographed in the rural Eastern Anatolia fringes near the borders of Syria, Iraq and Iran, where Kurdish separatists continue their fight for greater independence, the uniforms symbolise the Turkish state. But this complex backdrop, and the obvious poverty of their lives, is almost irrelevant. They are simply and defiantly presented as children, photographed at an age when they remain largely unaffected by the mask of self-consciousness - their nervous grace before the camera more extraordinary than where they're from, what they do, and what they stand for.
Girls also are the subject of Achinto Bhadra's show next door, except these subjects have had their innocence taken from them in the cruelest circumstances. Working with 126 women and girls aged eight to 25, many of whom had survived rape, abuse and trafficking, the Indian photographer collaborated with a counsellor, Harleen Walia, to shoot studio portraits of divine characters invested with powers of redemption and revenge. Shot in a shelter run by Sanlaap, a Kolkata-based NGO, Walia spent months listening to their stories before helping them to create ideas for the imaginary beings photographed by Bhadra a means of expressing their hopes and anger, and ultimately provide 'a healing journey of psychological transformation'
On a lighter note, Jean-Christian Bourcart provides one of the surprise hits of the Rencontres with The most beautiful day of my life. Bourcart used to be a wedding photographer, and here he presents the pictures that 'found no buyers and lay yellowing in boxes'. No wonder. He employed every tacky trick in the book, from the classic miniature-bride-in-the-groom's-hands shot, captured in-camera, together with hilarious (and often quite creepy) double-exposures, along with some heavy use of Vaseline blur. 'A good wedding photograph is a photograph sold,' says Bourcart, who admits to building a collection of tens of thousands of these unsold images, which nonetheless serve as an effective document of their time, 'archetypes of the new proletariat - suburbanites' as he puts it.
These shows play off each other nicely, but elsewhere in the Ateliers it all feels a bit random. At best, Lacroix's appreciation for pure image-making ensures there's infinite variety, and space is given over to visual pleasure rather than the usual navel-gazing. But there's also plenty that's vacuous and self-indulgent. For example, Patrick Swirc's Letter to Claire - the photographer's grief-stricken ramblings to his ex-girlfriend - probably should have remained a personal matter. Caring isn't always sharing. There's also Joel Bartolomeo's video works, one of which is The Revolver. The artist first pulls newspaper stories of world catastrophes across the frame, then focuses the lens on himself in close-up, tears in his eyes, as he quotes philosophers on cruelty and injustice - all to the soundtrack to Nick Cave's The Weeping Song.
What's most disappointing, however, is that this Rencontres' 'Discovery Awards' are so weak. As in previous years, the Awards are there to provide that commitment I mentioned to new - or at least lesser known - world talents, showcasing 15 nominees with full-size exhibitions chosen by five selectors. It must have seemed like a good idea for the festival to choose five experts associated with fashion, but despite their impressive CVs, most seemed unable to think outside the box, offering up a rather dreary illustration of why photographs designed for the glossy pages so rarely translate into interesting wall space. So even Cameron Smith, a promising young Australian whose eye for an iconic fashion photo is clearly illustrated by this week's cover, looks out of depth here, whether that's through poor editing or simply because he doesn't have enough yet to carry a show.
Thankfully, one of the selectors - Elisabeth Biondi, visuals editor for The New Yorker - provides a notable exception, and tellingly none of her three photographers works in fashion.
The first, Debbie Fleming Caffery, is a 60-year-old American who, like Roger Ballen, creates a disquieting world of dark drama that is part documentary, part fiction. Set in the grounds of a church in a small Mexican village, Desire Overall takes its title from the people playing out a daily ritual of sin and forgiveness, focusing on the cantina-cum-brothel that continues its trade in the shadow of the local community's spiritual centre.
The second and third choices are very different. Many have photographed the New York subway, but Ethan Levitas has a different take, photographing the battered trains from nearby rooftops as they criss-cross Brooklyn to Manhattan. Each carriage becomes a single elongated frame, and within them he captures the casual poetry of street photography, catching travellers in momentary reflective glances.
Then there is Pieter Hugo, who recently featured in BJP (14 May) with his portraits of Nigerian street entertainers and their semi-domesticated animals. They are shown here alongside wild honey collectors from Ghana who cover themselves in leaves and branches to protect them from bee stings. Their outfits take on a decorative look, and so its entirely appropriate that he won this year's EUR25,000 Award - just as everyone predicted.
But there are some whose work surpasses the banalities of fashion magazines. Tim Walker and Gregoire Alexandre, who each have their own show at the Ateliers, both avoid the digital trickery now synonymous with the industry. Instead they seem to revel in the endless possibilities of the fashion moment, constructing fantasies that are tangible rather than hyperreal. Walker's pictures are reminiscent of fairy-tales, sumptuously staged in decrepit manor houses in the English countryside, while Alexandre turns everyday items into strange props.
Elsewhere, in the old town's Cloitre Saint-Trophime, there's a more radical take on fashion journalism. Richard Avedon's 26-page spread in The New Yorker, titled In memory of Mr and Mrs Comfort, marked a watershed moment in the career of a photographer who had partly made his name through fashion. Published in 1995, it served as his caustic farewell to fashion photography - a 'fable' starring an actress model and a skeleton that left no one in doubt about his thoughts on the vacuity of consumerism.
Less can be said of Peter Lindbergh, whose languid, sullen beauties seem terribly dated now. But there is a local connection. His exhibition features work that was photographed exclusively in Arles and nearby Beaduc, 'my favourite place on earth to shoot'.
Both he and Paolo Roversi helped to define a new, more naturalistic approach to glamour, but it is the Italian whose work fares better with time. Roversi's sparse Parisian studio is as much the star of his photographs as the models he shoots there - an empty stage to be filled.
Francois Hugier's Kommunalka is a welcome diversion from her usual fashion stories and tediously exoticised travelogues of Asia and Africa, which seem to remain wildly popular in France. Instead, she has created a moving installation based around communal apartments in St Petersburg, which despite slipping into some easy Soviet austerity chic, evokes a richly atmospheric portrait of place, using photographs film snippets and sound clips. Pierre Gonnard's portraits of people on the fringes of Spanish society, reminiscent of Velasquez, are equally redolent.
Lacroix has chosen to show two very different projects by Gregoire Korganow, including the backstage reportage of Paris fashion shows he shot for Marie Claire, which first attracted the designer's attention.
More interesting is his work on the families of France's 60,000 prison inmates, particularly his series on Marie-Christine, who stands for hours diligently waiting outside her husband's jail, staring for a sign that he can see her. She is captured standing in the same vantage point, anxiously looking for the telltale towel hung from his cell window. There is joy when she sees it, and despair when he is gone again - a simple and effective illustration of how the prisoners' partners and families are also punished for their actions.
A few of the archive shows are well worth attending too. At the Espace Van Gogh, alongside the fashion video retrospective already mentioned and a beautifully staged tribute to the 'look books' of Martin Margiela and Commes de Garcons (including iconic work by Nick Knight in collaboration with Peter Saville), there's an exhibition devoted to the copyright registration photograph. Madeleine Vionnet's successful campaign to protect couturiers' designs from being copied in the early 1920s gave rise to a form of photographic registration - capturing garments from the front, side and back - whose forensic simplicity appears beautiful in today's hindsight, and which contrasts with the contemporary emphasis of lifestyle allusions over the actual garments themselves.
Lastly, I'd like to mention a show that fell outside Lacroix's remit, staged at Galerie Vu's regular venue at the Capitole, which was the real find of the festival for me. Jeffrey Silverthorne isn't well known outside the US, despite creating an extraordinary body of work over the past 40 years, but that's changing since Copenhagen's Fotografisk Centre's recent retrospective. And now Vu is showing some of his early photographs of dead bodies and female impersonators, alongside more recent work that is more obviously staged, involving the photographer in set-ups with naked women. Each of his photos, whether documentary or not, have a sense of ambiguous unease about them, reminiscent of Diane Arbus, whom he knew well.
Despite enjoying Lacroix's Rencontres, I would have liked to have made more such discoveries. The festival, though well worth a visit (shows run until mid-September), needs to bounce back with a sustained commitment to new work and exclusive premieres. Next year's 40th anniversary may provide more temptation to look back on past glories, but if the festival is going to remain relevant to the photographers, critics and curators who travel to Arles from all over the world during Professional Week, it needs to address this issue, quickly.
Exhibitions at the Rencontres d'Arles continue until 14 September. Visit here
