A Curated Companion to the 57th Rencontres d’Arles

Every year, the Recontres d’Arles transforms a small Provençal French city into a sprawling open-air museum. The 57th edition of the photography festival runs until October 4, this time unfolding across four thematic constellations: Independence, Journeys, Forms of Life and Revisits. Opening week was packed with pop-up restaurants, official and off-program exhibitions competing for attention and vernissages announced by the hour. Here’s a guide to what’s worth seeing on and off the official program.

Sutura and Cosmologies of the Heiresses at the Discovery Award Louis Roederer Foundation, Espace Monoprix

Boulevard Emile Combe, place Lamartine, 13200 Arles

Curator Nadine Hounkpatin frames this year’s Discovery Award as an exploration of photographic truth, gathering seven artists whose work argues that truth in an image isn’t found but “patiently crafted.” The premise feels particularly pointed given recent acts of image-censorship (a flogged-back photograph pulled from US national parks, a cancelled Caribbean-art show at Pompidou-Metz). 

Within the exhibition, Souleymane Bachir Diaw’s Sutura drapes a staged, veiled body in textiles from the Sahel, Europe and the Middle East. The fabric doubles as both a carrier of inherited family memory and a form of protection, concealing as much as it reveals. The title of the piece plays on a Wolof word for modesty and a Latin root meaning “to sew.” Mallory Lowe Mpoka’s Cosmologies of the Heiresses weaves photography through actual Jacquard textile and beadwork, tracing matrilineal transmission across a Belgian-Cameroonian family history marked by colonial rupture.

Park Chan-wook, On a Quiet Morning at Lee Ufan Arles

5 Rue de Vernon, 13200 Arles

Marking 140 years of French-Korean diplomatic ties, Lee Ufan Arles presents the Korean director Park Chan-wook’s photographic work for the first time in Europe. Chan-wook, a self-described “man in a hurry” on set, turns contemplative behind a still camera, shooting with no brief beyond whatever catches his experienced eye: parasols resembling a horde of ghosts, a cat, a suspended moment stripped of narrative. Given his reputation as a perfectionist who storyboards every shot, the ease he brings to these images is a nice surprise, and just as sharp-eyed in its own way.

Martine Barrat, Soul of the City at Espace Van Gogh

Pl. Félix Rey, 13200 Arles

Martine Barrat’s work is having a moment of overdue recognition this year, decades after she first started photographing New York’s marginalized neighborhoods, with everyone in Arles talking about the show. A former Parisian dancer, Barrat moved to New York in 1968, before an accident ended her dancing career. She started a video workshop for kids in the Lower East Side and Harlem, and when her camcorder was stolen during a documentary project with a South Bronx gang, its president gave her a photo camera instead, launching a decades-long practice among the same communities. Curated by Agathe Cancellieri with Chuck Kelton, the show tracks her gaze as an insider rather than an observer, someone who lived alongside the people she photographed, from 1970s gang life to boxing clubs to, later, the Goutte d’Or in Paris, where she landed on assignment for Libération in 1982, producing what amounts to a portrait of neighborhoods as much as of people.

Ming Smith, Wandering Light at Église Sainte-Anne

8 Pl. de la République, 13200 Arles

In 1972, Ming Smith became the first woman to join Kamoinge, the pioneering Black photographers’ collective. Seven years later, she became the first Black female photographer acquired by MoMA. In Wandering Light curator Daisy Desrosiers gives her an expanded reading, placing her alongside European art history. Smith’s work uses blur as method, with faces dissolving and cityscapes that feel like memories rather than recorded facts. It’s a way of working built to keep Black interiority open instead of pinning it down to anything fixed.

Paul Kodjo, Photoromance at Croisière

65 Bd Emile Combes, 13200 Arles

Photoromance is the first major solo show in France for the late Ivorian photographer. It’s curated by Amandine Nana, who is known for her commitment to rediscovering artists unjustly overlooked by art history, and co-produced with the Palais de Tokyo. Kodjo was among the first African photographers to work in the photo-novel format, producing cinematic, melodramatic images serialized in Ivoire Dimanche, a weekly Ivorian magazine, from 1971 onward. This exhibition catches him chronicling Abidjan’s “Ivorian miracle” years of nightlife, fashion and romance. Les Rencontres du Sud spent fifteen years preserving the negatives, and in 2025 launched a new restoration phase through UCLA’s Modern Endangered Archives Program, in partnership with Nana’s own effort to give Kodjo his place in history.

Katia Kameli, The Algerian Novel (A New Chapter) at Église Saint-Blaise

33 Rue Vauban, 13200 Arles

Presented as part of Saison Méditerranée 2026, a nationwide French project celebrating art and exchange across the Mediterranean, The Algerian Novel (A New Chapter) is curated by Clément Dirié. It’s the latest instalment in a project French-Algerian artist Katia Kameli began in 2016, built around a real postcard kiosk in Algiers that has long traded in the country’s colonial and post-independence imagery. This chapter follows philosopher Marie-José Mondzain into Algiers during the Hirak protests, where she meets and discusses the work of Louiza Ammi, one of the few photojournalists to document Algeria’s Black Decade, while excerpts from Assia Djebar’s 1978 film-poem are woven directly into the film. For the first time, Kameli also folds in her own biography, a shift that gives the piece a new perspective.

Orianne Ciantar Olive, Circular Ruins at Maison des Peintres

43 Bd Emile Combes, 13200 Arles

Also part of Saison Méditerranée 2026, Circular Ruins is one of the edition’s more formally radical propositions. In 2019, Ciantar Olive set out to retrace the old Beirut-Damascus railway line back into Syria, but never made it across the border. She turned south instead, toward the Israeli-Lebanese separation wall at Kfar Kila. This shift caused the project to work in reverse from there: Lebanon became “Nabil,” an anagram of its French name, and Olive loaded her camera with the film flipped backwards, so each image exposes on the film’s reverse side rather than its emulsion, giving the photographs a strange red-orange cast. The title Circular Ruins borrows from a Jorge Luis Borges short story about a man who discovers that he only exists because someone else dreamed him into being. The project also draws on the poetry of Lebanese-American writer Etel Adnan. Olive folds both into the project that feels less like a documentary than an interrogation of what an image can do once it turns against its own certainties.

Beyond the official program

Prologue at Casa Ideale (until October)

915 Chemin de la Batelle, 13200 Arles (by appointment) 

Casa Ideale launched its first pop-up hotel in Arles with a photography exhibition that doubles as an architectural experiment. Conceived by We Are Ona’s Luca Pronzato, in collaboration with Milan’s Fondazione Sozzani, Prologue brings together more than 67 photographs from Carla Sozzani’s personal collection, including Helmut Newton, Irving Penn and Sarah Moon, into Villa Bank, a 1970s house designed by architect Émile Sala which is listed as a twentieth-century heritage site. Curator Maddalena Scarzella pairs the photographs with furniture selected by Luna Laffanour of Galerie Downtown+, including pieces by Jean Prouvé and Ettore Sottsass. 

Un train en cache un autre at La Mercerie (until July 24)

12 Rue du Président Wilson, 13200 Arles

Un train en cache un autre is a Super 8 film essay by director Natas3000 and writer Morgane Ortin, created from a trip to Japan the pair took in 2025. Ortin’s text is narrated by actor Erwan Kepoa Falé and moves in dialogue with Natas3000’s grainy footage, over a soundscape by Nola Sound. The project circles the question: what remains of someone who disappears without dying? It explores what the pair call ‘the living dead’: people who leave our lives but keep resurfacing in a gesture, a habit or a turn of phrase.

S.U.S.P.E.C.T.S: Van Gogh, Tricksters & Co at Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles (until October 18)

35 Rue du Dr Fanton, 13200 Arles

Curated by Jean de Loisy and Margaux Bonopera, S.U.S.P.E.C.T.S: Van Gogh, Tricksters & Co runs with a mischievous premise: that Van Gogh himself was something of a rule-breaker, who once told his brother Theo that respectable painting tempted him far less than its rogue counterpart. Taking the trickster, the jester and the outcast found in mythology as its throughline, the show gathers 33 artists who’ve made dissent and excess their method. Van Gogh’s own smirking skull-with-cigarette self-portrait sets the tone, echoed later by the likes of Cindy Sherman and Bruce Nauman, while Kippenberger, Sarah Lucas, Cattelan and Jacques Lizène supply the grotesque comedy. On paper the premise sounds shaky, but it’s become one of this year’s word-of-mouth must-sees, and it’s easy to understand why. The show is genuinely funny, if a little bit unsettling, but detailed enough to make you stop and read every wall text.

Correspondences, Soundwalk Collective & Patti Smith, at LUMA Arles (until November 8)

33 Av. Victor Hugo, 13200 Arles

More than a decade in the making, Correspondences is the first major European staging of the full collaboration between Soundwalk Collective’s Stephan Crasneanscki and Patti Smith. The exhibition is an immersive installation of film, field recording and poetry set in LUMA’s La Grande Halle. Two new works commissioned for Arles turn to the Camargue itself, threading Roman-era settlement and Provençal legends of Mary Magdalene into a body of work already haunted by figures like painter Andrei Rublev and anarchist-geographer Peter Kropotkin. Crasneanscki’s field recordings, drawn from the planet’s most fragile landscapes, meet Smith’s voice channeling the children of Chernobyl and the Greek sorceress Medea. Visitors walk into an enormous room lined with towering screens, causing a moment of disorientation, before sitting down and sinking into a meditative, almost transcendental state.