From Harlem to the Goutte-d'Or: Martine Barrat finally revealed in Arles

Recognition has been slow in coming. Martine Barrat, a photographer who has remained unjustly obscure despite a body of work built over several decades, is being showcased this summer by the Rencontres d'Arles, the leading international photography festival held every year in the southern French city since 1970.

The exhibition traces a career spanning two working-class geographies: on one side the streets of Harlem and a New York in crisis, where Barrat shared the daily lives of gang members, entering their world rather than observing it from a distance; on the other the Goutte-d'Or, a migrant neighbourhood in northern Paris whose residents, shops and street life she photographed.

Her method partly explains the delayed recognition. Where classic photojournalism chases the event, Barrat settled in for the long haul, building relationships of trust with her subjects — boxers, street youths, families — to the point that her images function as collective portraits as much as social documents. Produced outside the major editorial circuits and little seen in France for years, such work has remained on the margins of standard histories of photography.

Arles's gesture fits a broader pattern. For some time now, festivals and museums have been revisiting the archives of forgotten photographers, women in particular, whose bodies of work resurface through retrospectives and new publications. For Barrat, the exhibition offers a chance to see the full arc of her work, from the Bronx to Paris's 18th arrondissement, and may renew the interest of public collections in an oeuvre still largely awaiting documentation.

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Written by the ADM desk based on Beaux Arts Magazine. Read the original article for the full story.