A collaborative event-series between Barbara Levine, Paige Ramey and Eidolon Centre for Everyday Photography during the opening week of Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles
Location: 14 Rue de Vernon 13200, Arles, France
Dates: July 9-11, 2025
For this year’s Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles, Eidolon and Project B joined forces to bring Barbara Levine and Paige Ramey’s wonderfully unique PhotoCircus collection to the festival in the form of three 2-hour long sessions on 9, 10 and 11 July.
Eidolon Club is a versatile event series curated by Eidolon Centre for Everyday Photography with the goal to offer fresh perspectives and networking opportunities centred around the appreciation of vernacular imagery delving into new dimensions and challenging traditional perceptions of visual culture. Through curated programs, film screenings, workshops, talk events, and guided tours hosted at various venues, Eidolon Club provides a platform for enthusiasts, professionals, students, and curious individuals to come together and celebrate the most ubiquitous, ever-present, wide-ranging form of visual communication of the last two centuries.
Project B is an archive and collaborative curatorial venture run by Barbara Levine and Paige Ramey who are artists and collectors specializing in vernacular photography. They are the authors of eight books including Snapshot Chronicles: Inventing the American Photo Album, Around the World: The Grand Tour in Photo Albums and Caption This: A Photographic Collection of Amusing comments, Snarky asides and Romantic admissions (all Princeton Architectural Press). PhotoCircus is Project B’s newest collection of visual treasures, an uncommon archive of vernacular photographs, photo-based objects, ephemera and artifacts. With in-person presentations, exhibits, publishing projects, and collaborations, the collection is an ever-evolving three-ring spectacle of discovery. It is the first of its kind to look at the way photography has been depicted in popular culture and the ways photographic images, materials, and ideas overlap, link, and reveal new layers of meaning.
The three hands-on sessions will offer a unique opportunity to explore the parallels between historical and modern photographic practices. By examining photo-objects from different eras, participants will gain a deeper understanding of how photography has been used to document, celebrate, and manipulate reality. This exploration is particularly relevant in our digital age, where images play a significant role in shaping our perceptions and experiences.
Paige Ramey and Barbara Levine
Each presentation by Levine and Ramey will be approximately 2 hours and will feature a guest conversation partner. Attendance is free but to facilitate interactivity and discussion there will be a limit of 20 spots available per presentation – to be able to attend please register here.
July 9, 2025, 10:00 - 12:00 – conversation partner: Shana Lopes
Shana Lopes is an Assistant Curator of Photography at SFMOMA. Born and raised in San Francisco, she has curated or co-curated exhibitions such as: “Constellations: Photographs in Dialogue”, “Sightlines: Photographs from the Collection”, “A Living for Us All: Artists and the WPA”, “Sea Change”, Zanele Muholi: Eye Me”. Over the past fourteen years, she has gained curatorial experience at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
July 10, 2025, 10:00 - 12:00 – conversation partners: Todd Hido and Marina Luz
Todd Hido is an acclaimed American photographer known for his evocative and cinematic imagery, often capturing suburban and rural landscapes artist whose work has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times Magazine, Eyemazing, Wired, Elephant, FOAM, and Vanity Fair. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Getty, the Whitney Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the de Young, the Smithsonian, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Pier 24 Photography, as well as in many other public and private collections. His exhibition titled “The Light from Within” is on view in Arles until October 5, 2025.
Marina Luz is an artist and Emmy Award-winning illustrator whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Vice, ProPublica, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, among other publications. She is the Studio Director on behalf of Todd Hido and they have been collaborators for nearly a decade.
July 11, 2025, 10:00 - 12:00 – conversation partner: Lukas Birk and Ramón Reverté
Lukas Birk is a photographer, researcher and publisher. He researches his imagery through investigations and explorations very often in areas that have been affected by conflict and have not yet had the chance to present existing material in an artistic form such as Afghanistan or Myanmar. He co-founded artist platforms and residency programs in China and Indonesia, an archive platform in Afghanistan and initiated the Myanmar Photo Archive. Since 2011 he publishes books on photographic history under the imprint Fraglich Publishing. Lukas gives workshops in printmaking, photobook making and consults on visual narrative construction. His latest book titled “Twana’s Box: The Photographic Life of Twana Abdullah, Kurdistan Region of Iraq 1974-1992” was on the shortlist of this year’s Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards in 2025. Lukas is also an Eidolon Grant winner with his project co-curated with Matthieu Paley titled “Jugaar – a Pakistani guide to aspirational living”.
Ramón Reverté has been involved with RM’s photobook program since its founding in Mexico in 1999, serving as editor-in-chief and creative director. Over the years, he has had the opportunity to collaborate on the editing of more than 500 books, published in both English and Spanish and distributed internationally. Now based in Barcelona, RM’s photobook program has gradually grown to become one of the most active in Latin America and Spain. He has been fortunate to share some of his experiences at photography events such as The Photobook Forum in Kassel, the Latin American Photobook Symposium at Aperture in New York, and the Fórum Latino Americano de Fotografia in São Paulo, among others. In 2013, he was invited to join the jury for the Infinity Awards of the International Center of Photography. Ramón is also one of the co-authors of The Latin American Photobook, which received the Historical Book Award at the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival.
For more information about Project B visit projectb.com or follow them on IG at @projectbphotos.
The Eidolon Club event is realised with the kind support of Librairie du Palais.
