A Curated Companion to Les Rencontres d’Arles 2025

With an overwhelming number of exhibitions, navigating the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival and its counterpart, OFF, is no easy feat. This year’s theme is Disobedient Images, inspired by French writer and poet Edouard Glissant who once wrote that: “Our identities (…) aren’t rooted in a single territory. They extend, crossbreed, shift and constantly recreate themselves.” Here is a curated selection of the top Rencontres d’Arles exhibitions not to be missed. 

Stendhal Syndrome by Nan Goldin 

Honoured as this year’s winner of the Kering Women in Motion prize, Nan Goldin is the festival headliner. In the intimate Eglise de Saint-Blaise, Goldin’s 2024 slideshow Stendhal Syndrome plays for 25 guests at a time. Structured following Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Goldin casts close friends and lovers as mythological characters, interweaving her intimate portraits with famed works of art history. Her voice-over recounts the tales, scored by Soundwalk Collective and a piece by composer Mica Levi. The effect is arresting, as Goldin ends the piece by reminding viewers of Stendhal’s famous syndrome, an ecstatic trance in the face of transcendent beauty. 

Women, Sisters by Erica Lennard

Erica Lennard grew up in Berkeley, California before moving to Paris in the midst of the counterculture and the hippie movements. The photographer frequented early editions of the Rencontres d’Arles in the 1970s, where she explored the genre of the photographic nude through the festival’s workshops dedicated to the form. Women, Sisters traces the creation and reception of Lennard’s 1976 book of the same name. Intimate and ethereal portraits of her friend Elizabeth reveal an innate and impenetrable sisterhood, a new notion later embraced by the feminist movement. What emerges is a highly contemplative and consuming celebration of female bonds. The show also features tender portraits of actresses such as Jane Birkin, Jeanne Moreau, Delphine Seyrig and Charlotte Rampling. 

In Praise of Anonymous Photography curated by Marion and Philippe Jacquier Collection

Collectors Marion and Philippe Jacquier are “image seekers.” Over more than 20 years, the founders of the gallery Lumière des roses have amassed a collection of 10,000 anonymous silver prints covering more than a century of photography. Chosen for their fascinating mystery or uniqueness, the images are arranged around themes of history, intimacy and obsession. An extraordinary album created by a young man in the 1930s traces his brief love affair with the elusive ‘Rose.’ The album contains pictures of the places they visited together, with red crosses marking where Rose once sat or stood. The vacant scenes are enlivened by his notes of the name of the street and what they did there. In another section, viewers are introduced to Lucette who, during her travels between 1954 and 1977, had hundreds of photos taken of herself, rather than the usual tourist snaps of landmarks.

The exhibition is a perfect way to discover the best of Arles’s monuments. Visitors find the collection behind the main square’s palace, climbing a broad, limestone stairwell to reach the upper floor of the Cloître Saint-Trophime – the monastery’s covered walkways fit with arched galleries and an enclosed garden.

David Armstrong

Located on the lower floor of the LUMA tower is an exhibition of David Armstrong’s early black-and-white portraits featuring youthful artists from the American 1970s avant-garde scene. A close friend of Nan Goldin, Armstrong was equally drawn to photographing his contemporaries and companions. Immortalised in striking images depicting a youthful spirit, John Waters collaborator Cookie Mueller stares assuredly into the lens, losing none of her famed presence and prowess. 

J’ai Toujours Cherché la Vie by Letizia Battaglia

In a chapel bordering the Rhone, visitors can explore the œuvre of Letizia Battaglia. A photographer and journalist, Battaglia started out in the late 1960s documenting the changing social mores of Italy. Battaglia’s most prolific period came during the mid-1970s, where she wrote and photographed for the newspaper L’Ora, documenting the Mafia-related violence that gripped Palermo. The exhibition displays some of these gripping and gut-wrenching images but also covers Battaglia’s lesser known shots of the everyday hardships of her region. Incredibly graphic and moving humanist photographs line the walls, and attest to a colourful world witnessed through triumph and tribulation. 

Brazilian Modernist Photography: Construction Deconstruction Reconstruction

In a large hall behind the LUMA tower, La Mécanique Générale offers insight into the overlooked modernist photographers of Brazil. Read more about the show here. 

Pelle di Lava by Chiara Indelicato

A guide to the unmissable exhibitions in Arles wouldn’t be complete without a mention of Festival OFF, Rencontres’s sister festival, spread out through the town’s galleries, homes and restaurants. The 107 exhibitions show artists of all backgrounds, amateur and professional. By the town’s main square, Anne Clergue Gallery presents the work of Stromboli photographer Chiara Indelicato. Pelle di Lava is a documentation of life on a volcanic island, showing both the beauty of the sprawling volcanic fertility and its constant whisper of destruction. After two disasters that occurred in 2022 – a fire that destroyed the island’s vegetation and floods causing mud slides – Indelicato offers a reflection on the climate emergency that voices our innate connection to nature.