Every Could the seaside city of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer within the Camargue hosts the Gitan Pilgrimage, a gathering of French and Catalan Gypsies. The city’s medieval church homes the statue of Sara-la-Kali, the Black Madonna, which is carried right down to the ocean, as a sign for the partying to start. The photographer Lucien Clergue first photographed the pilgrimage in 1955. He had grown up in Arles, simply to the north, and was trying to find a visible language of the Mediterranean that captured each historic custom and the stirrings of postwar hedonism. The pilgrimage, its dancers and its guitar gamers, rooted that concept. This image was taken on the seashore at Saintes-Marie in 1957.
Clergue had met Picasso in 1953, having waited outdoors the bullring at Arles to point out him a few of his pictures; he was solely 19 on the time of this encounter, however the pair turned pals. Clergue’s first guide, Corps Memorable (1957), a set of photos of nudes on French seashores, got here with a canopy by Picasso and an introduction by Jean Cocteau. He shared a lot of Picasso’s preoccupations, making collection of images of bullfights, and animal corpses and harlequin troupes.
In 1970, with the author Michel Tournier, Clergue created the well-known summer time pictures competition at Arles, which now attracts 150,000 guests yearly. This 12 months, the competition features a celebratory retrospective of Clergue’s pictures of the Mediterranean – together with this one – curated by his daughter, Anne. Clergue, who died in 2014, aged 80, by no means forgot the bombing of town throughout the struggle, which destroyed his household dwelling; the competition was a superb antidote to that historical past. His footage typically dwelled on life and solar and sea and intercourse, however there was all the time an undertow of melancholy; on a shoot on the seashores of his beloved Camargue, he was as soon as heard to exclaim: “Look, I'm photographing my tomb!”
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