[The Guardian] The big picture: dancing on the beach in the Camargue, 1957

The big picture: dancing on the beach in the Camargue, 1957

Lucien Clergue’s shot, taken in the French seaside town of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, celebrates a Gypsy pilgrimage amid the stirrings of postwar hedonism

Every May the seaside town of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue hosts the Gitan Pilgrimage, a gathering of French and Catalan Gypsies. The town’s medieval church houses the statue of Sara-la-Kali, the Black Madonna, which is carried down to the sea, as a signal for the partying to begin. The photographer Lucien Clergue first photographed the pilgrimage in 1955. He had grown up in Arles, just to the north, and was searching for a visual language of the Mediterranean that captured both ancient tradition and the stirrings of postwar hedonism. The pilgrimage, its dancers and its guitar players, rooted that idea. This picture was taken on the beach at Saintes-Marie in 1957.

Clergue had met Picasso in 1953, having waited outside the bullring at Arles to show him some of his photographs; he was only 19 at the time of this encounter, but the pair became friends. Clergue’s first book, Corps Memorable (1957), a collection of images of nudes on French beaches, came with a cover by Picasso and an introduction by Jean Cocteau. He shared many of Picasso’s preoccupations, making series of pictures of bullfights, and animal corpses and harlequin troupes.

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Source: The big picture: dancing on the beach in the Camargue, 1957

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