Awarding the Prix D'Arles: A Book Contest Judge Tells All
by A. D. Coleman

Mentioning the name of Arles, the sleepy little Mediterranean town in the south of France, usually evokes those omnipresent fields of sunflowers so beloved of Vincent van Gogh, who lived and painted there. For professionals in photography, however, the town has acquired another meaning. It's the site of the annual Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie, a month-long festival that has become the European photography community's central meeting place.

Though it is generally referred to as the "Arles festival," the R.I.P. (its name translates roughly as "international photography congress") more strongly evokes the carnival. Held each July, it is a monumental undertaking -- a month of workshops, three dozen exhibits, and, at the beginning, an intensive week of afternoon panel discussions and lectures followed by evening slide-shows. All of which is interspersed with socializing, gossip, press conferences, and the like, involving photographers, editors, publishers, gallery owners, curators, critics, and students.

Europe operates primarily on personal contact. Consequently, the European photo scene is rife with such get-togethers. Almost every nation now hosts one, at least on a biennial level. But Arles, founded in 1969 by photographer-filmmaker (and native son) Lucien Clergue, is by far the oldest. Energized and vital, the event serves as both a showcase and a marketplace for all kinds of photographic imagery and photography projects. This year's twentieth-anniversary celebration was among the most dynamic sessions in Rencontres history.

My own official participation in the festival consisted of a pre-arranged engagement in three afternoon sessions of "seminar-dialogue" with photographer/publisher Ralph Gibson (founder of Lustrum Press), under the rubric of "State of the Art," plus the surprise request that I serve as one of the jurors for the prestigious Prix du Livre Photographique 1989 (generally known as the Prix d'Arles), awarded to the jury's choice for Book of the Year.

Though I've shied away from judging contests, this time I agreed, partly out of an authorial curiosity and partly out of a journalist's desire to report on the proceedings. The following account may give pause to photographers and the authors and publishers of photo books, as it does to me; indeed, it may curl the hair of those who spend thousands of dollars and years of their lives in the production of fine volumes of photographic work. Certainly a more rationalized and deliberative system could be devised; pressure for same from photographers, critics, historians and publishers would encourage such a development.

There were five of us on this jury: Manfred Heiting, formerly with Polaroid's European division, now publisher and editorial director for all American Express publications in Europe, and also organizer of the Fotografie Forum in Frankfurt, Germany; Eliane Laffont of SYGMA, the picture agency; David Balsells, in charge of Primavera Photographica, an upcoming festival in Spain; Agnes de Gouvion St. Cyr, General Secretary of the Rencontres; and myself.

When we arrived at 9:30 a.m. on Friday, July 7 at the library of the Ecole Nationale de la Photographie (which organizes and houses the Rencontres workshops and seminars), we were greeted by no less than 120 books from all over the world that have been entered in the contest. None of us could conceivably have been already familiar with more than ten percent of the entries. Everything but collections of critical essays had been submitted; in one way or another, these were all "picture books." The only criterion for submission was that the book had to have been published during the preceding year. There were no guidelines for the judging, not even separate categories. Only one could win. We had to decide by noon.

By 11:30, we'd "familiarized" ourselves with those we each found truly substantial on such short acquaintance, had exchanged not a word, and I was down to 14 titles I wanted to spend a week with before I made up my mind. But the hour of decision had come. How to proceed? After some discussion, we decided to separate out any title in which any of us was interested. With some trepidation, I volunteered my list, which turned out to be longer than anyone else's by far but also included many of their selections. We ended that process with two dozen volumes on the table.

Immediately, therefore, we initiated a vote: a book had to have two or more votes to stay in the group. That narrowed the field down to 12. Further discussion established some criteria: reprints, no matter how well done, were secondary; the winner should use book form in a distinctive way, not just be a well-produced catalogue of images; design and layout mattered greatly; and the sentiment of the jury was that the prize should go to a living and working photographer, not a historian or critic or editor.

Another round of voting, with three votes necessary to stay in the running, brought us down to four titles: Cristina Garcia Rodero's España Oculta ("Hidden Spain"), in which Spanish festivals and rituals are scrutinized with the left eye of Josef Koudelka and the right eye of Manuel Alvarez Bravo; Julio Mitchel's Triptych, a somber, introspective meditation on love, war and death; Peter Bunnell's challenging, revisionist Minor White: The Eye that Shapes; and Joachim Bonnemaison's unprecedented, sumptuous survey of panoramic photography, Panoramas 1850-1950.

One last vote and it was done. Rodero won the Prix d'Arles, and the 6000FF (roughly $1000) check that goes with it. The jury indicated that the other three were to be announced as Honorable Mentions, in three categories -- Mitchel for Monograph, Bunnell for Critical Biography, Bonnemaison for History. None of us had any arguments, nor, it seemed, any immediate second thoughts or regrets (certainly not me: all four had been on my list of 14). The clock pointed to five minutes after noon.

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Postscript: The award to Rodero was announced, and the check handed over, during one of the soirees the following night. The Honorable Mentions went unmentioned at that time -- though we were assured they would be included in the press release on the award. As of this writing, almost three months later, no press release of any kind concerning the award has appeared.

This essay first appeared in the Author's Guild Bulletin (Fall/Winter 1989), pp. 29-30.

Copyright © 1989 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved. For reprint permissions contact Image/World Syndication Services, POB 040078, Staten Island, NY 10304-0002 USA;T/F (718) 447-3091, imageworld@nearbycafe.com