I think by now it is really no surprise how governments, state and corporate sponsored institutions are purposely ignoring any support for the plight of Palestinians. Their silence and complicity are nothing short of disgusting. In the face of witnessing this wholesale murder these entities cite national security and human rights but clearly in a selective one-sided way. Historically, some of them used the same violence to colonise parts of the world and today this blatant act of violent neocolonialism unfolds in front of us all.
Calling for a photo festival or any biennial to do something or show support is a futile gesture in my opinion. Like these governments, they are already folded into this complicity through the financial support they receive while refusing to even acknowledge the situation in Palestine. They band around the “antisemitism” word as their reason for not challenging or representing any conversation or counter-narrative. This is without even really understanding the provenance or meaning of this complex term, now used interchangeably as a lazy, general slur for any criticism of Israel. They do this for fear of ostracisation from their vested economic partners while purporting to support art and culture – the supposed domain of free and radical ideas – a space that now, for many institutions, one might think appears to be on very rocky ground. But artists and curators need these organisations, so for now, its business as usual.
No Photo 2025’s poster intervention around parts of the town of Arles, France, during the Rencontres d’ Arles 2025 offers a concerted response to the absent representation of this subject and perhaps also generates some other provocative questions. It operates autonomously outside of the festival and its spaces drawing attention to visual representation while also denying it. No Photo 2025 can be seen in public during the festival, no entry fee, no image, just a description of an image. In several versions distributed across town, it consists of a diptych, a black rectangle adjacent to a piercing textual description of what the image, if seen, would show, an ekphrasis of sorts but really a rendition of a poetic alt-text. In all cases they reference a photograph taken by a journalist on the ground in Gaza. The images witnessed and recorded, some by journalists who have since been killed while working in the area, have been censored by the media regimes of Western press and news. This is for many reasons, and not least for the suppression of explicit depictions of human suffering from the region and how these might mobilise further support.
Described as an intervention, an activation against complicity and silence, it is clearly targeted at the festival’s visitors as they traverse the streets and paths between exhibitions, events, dinners and parties. The texts, all written in English offer some sterile pause for thought. This becomes particularly acute at a festival which centres the photographic image as the locus for aesthetics and disseminating knowledge of social and political issues. An unseen image, therefore, serves as an anti-image, a direct criticism of the festival’s main preoccupation, emphasising the impossibility of relaying the experience of suffering through visual representation. This artistic strategy is not completely unprecedented, as seen in the works of Alfredo Jaar with reference to the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and more recently in Jonathan Glazer’s film, A Zone of Interest (2024). Only two examples which I can think of as I write, where images of suffering are completely absent or are redacted while the viewer is provided an alternative mediated device (text or sound) as a substitute. This has the intended effect of propelling their viewer’s imagination towards horror on non-visual terms. Something that has proved to be, certainly in my mind since Hitchcock, equally if not more effective in inducing a visceral response.
It is interesting to note that the text, despite being formed through an ekphrastic relationship has no desire to withhold subjectivity. The texts do not hide an emotional, poetic or political position in relation to the subject matter. Created by writers and poets, the producers have courted sentiment, a humanist interpretation based on an empathic view. In this respect it feels not unlike the kind of response that many photographic projects as seen in gallery walls of Arles that week seek to induce in their visitors, so something akin to the language of concerned photography and photo festivals in general. An alternative approach, I think, something more faithful to description as opposed to emotion may have seemed colder and detached, drawn less attention, in danger of being bypassed as lacking empathy. As such, the words seemed to linger with the people who engaged with No Photo 2025, so much that judging by the numerous posts on Instagram, the intervention had a significant effect on all those that saw the posters.
The No Photo 2025 project was conceived by an anonymous group of international artists and activists who wanted to activate the work of Palestinian photographers and journalists in Gaza in a climate of otherwise alarming passivity. Their intention was in only foregrounding these unrecognised individuals while operating outside a system that normally privileges and awards authorship. The black space of the redacted image symbolic as an act of refusal towards this and any further violence against those in the image and honouring them and the producers of the image in a gesture of mourning.
I felt compelled to write about this as a counter festival initiative giving credence to the idea that spaces outside of the institutional-corporate domain can be effective and critically engaging on a limited budget, while tackling what institutions are currently afraid to do. This is not an indictment of individuals who work and do the hard graft for institutions, rather the board members and senior figures who turn a blind eye in order to maintain their position and (blood) money. This is while being responsible for a festival that supposedly represents and reflects the contemporary world, a hypocrisy that keeps coming to light in the cultural sector. Fortunately, fringe projects like No Photo 2025 can attend to what is critically, severely lacking from the discourse, context or content of mainstream programming.
No Photo 2025 continues in Arles until 5th October 2025.