Arles: the Whole Town Is Wallpapered With Photographs

The train put me into Arles just after eight, and for an hour I had the place to myself. Cobbles, closed shutters, one ochre wall doing all the work, and a lane that ends in a slab of light. This is the town Van Gogh came to in 1888 for the light. You can be sniffy about that story, or you can stand in a lane at half past nine with the sun coming over the roofline and admit the man had a point.

Place du Forum, and there it is. The yellow cafe off the painting. Shut. Chairs stacked in a heap, the flowers over the awning gone brown, the render going green along the bottom, and VAN GOGH still lettered across the wall in that dark red. It has been closed since 2023 over a tax case and nobody has been near it since. Cafe terrace at night, in the middle of the morning, with the tables in a pile.

The town is wallpapered. The Rencontres run from July to October and the photographs are not only inside, they are pasted flat onto the render, curling at the corners, bleaching in the sun. Outside the Reattu there is a poster for Christian Lacroix, who was born here, fifty years of his scribbles and graffiti done on hotel notepads and the backs of envelopes. My kind of archive.

Up near Saint-Julien, a window full of wire. Odile Vailly has been bending and plaiting it since 1999, when she started with insects and never stopped. This one is a family, near enough life size, pinned flat to a white wall so the shadow doubles every line and draws the whole thing again in grey. Line, then the shadow of the line. Any animator will tell you that is half the job. The tag on the corner said 120.

Then you turn a corner and the arena is simply there. Two tiers of Roman arches with a medieval tower planted on top like a hat somebody forgot to take off. People queueing in the shade, one kid taking the steps two at a time. I did not draw it. Everybody draws it. I sat on the hot stone and looked at the way the arches get shallower as they bend away from you, and thought about how long that took to work out without a computer.

What I did stop for was this. Halfway up the hill, a tabby on a windowsill behind a vine, watching the street and not moving for anyone. Look at the leaves. Look at the crack running along the sill. The whole thing was composed before I got there, which is the polite way of saying the cat did the work and I pressed a button.

The best room of the day had almost no roof left. A ruined church off the rue de la Republique, stone gone black, green display panels wheeled in and photographs bolted onto them. Later, at the Espace Van Gogh, which is the old hospital where they patched him up after the ear, the show is children’s photography books. Eikoh Hosoe, Japan, 1933 to 2024. Stefan Moses, Germany, 1928 to 2018. Photographers of that size, making books for kids. I stood in front of that a long while.

Out the east end of town, Frank Gehry’s tower. Eleven thousand stainless steel panels, opened in 2021, and it does not sit in Arles so much as land on it. I have hated it in photographs for years. In person, with the arena still in your eye, you can see exactly what he was looking at. The photography school sits at its feet. The supermarket up the road had a hundred prints from the Fnac collection hung around a story by Nathacha Appanah, and I had twenty minutes before my train, which is not enough for a hundred of anything.

So it goes on the list for another day. Back on the Sorgue by evening, and the wheel on the corner was still turning, moss hanging off every paddle, water falling through the last of the light. After a whole day of other people’s photographs, twelve seconds of that was exactly the right size.