On the evening of Monday, July 5th, 2021, the Women In Motion Award will be officially presented to Liz Johnson Artur at the inaugural event at the Théâtre Antique in Arles. On that occasion, she will show her work and share with the audience her creative journey and her views on women’s place in photography.


Since 1991, Liz Johnson Artur has compiled a body of work dedicated to the African diaspora worldwide, brought together in her Black Balloon Archive. These dynamic documentary photographs, in black and white and in color, paint a complex picture of Black identities. In lieu of working with a ‘subject’, the artist photographs human beings and uses her work to tell stories: “What I'm interested in is people,” she says, “the ones I don’t see represented anywhere.” 
“Women have been part of the history of photography from the outset, and they have produced incredible work. The great thing about this award is that it shines a spotlight on works that haven’t always been adequately recognized, and it alerts us to the fact that recognizing women photographers shouldn’t just happen once a year.” Liz Johnson Artur 

Liz Johnson Artur will be presented in the exhibition Masculinities at the Rencontres d’Arles in 2021. 

In March 2019, Kering and the Rencontres d’Arles announced their partnership and the launch in Arles of the Women In Motion program, which each year salutes the career of an outstanding photographer. The prize is accompanied by an endowment of 25,000 euros to acquire works by the winning artist for the Rencontres d’Arles collection. The Women In Motion Award for Photography previously has been awarded to two exceptional photographers, Susan Meiselas (2019), and Sabine Weiss (2020). 

In 2019, Kering and the Rencontres d’Arles also created the Women In Motion LAB, which aims to highlight forgotten women in the history of photography. For its first two years, the LAB was dedicated to a research project on the place of women who have marked photography since its origins. In 2020, that project led to the publication, by Editions Textuel, of Une histoire mondiale des femmes photographes (A World History of Women Photographers) which presents the work of 300 women photographers through texts by more than 160 women authors from around the world.
For its second edition, the LAB will accompany for the next two years two projects focused on rediscovering two remarkable women photographers who are unknown to the general public.