It is a powerful exhibition that upsets a tenet of one’s entire worldview, and that is precisely what the photographs of Daniella Rossell, on show at the forty-second Rencontres d’Arles, did to one of mine.
The Rencontres is an annual festival of photographic work from around the world that is exhibited throughout the city. I find it odd that I should have developed an interest in this art so late in life—if art is what it is, though the question matters little, everything (including photography) being what it is and not another thing, to quote the profound Bishop Butler. My earlier dismissal of photography now seems to me snobbish, hasty, and shallow, a melancholy enough reflection on my former self.
My deeply, and almost affectionately, held tenet that Rossell’s photographs overthrew, with her exhibition called “Ricas y Famosas” (“The Rich and Famous”), was that the modern British are the most vulgar people in the world: Rossell has found a group of people in her native Mexico who make the aesthetic discrimination of the average drunken, beer-swilling, pot-bellied, tattooed, and eyebrow-pierced Briton seem like that of Bernard Berenson or Harold Acton. As the title of the exhibition implies, the members of this group are rich, though I am insufficiently acquainted with modern Mexico to know whether any of them is actually famous or if they merely aspire to fame. Either way, the photos are like an X-ray of the modern soul, and not just
