The opening week of the Rencontres de la photographie d'Arles is full of history and discussions between passionate, ambitious and visionary individuals in an idyllic setting.
Every summer, the Rencontres de la Photographie transforms Arles into a vast playground for artistic exploration. Far beyond the official program, the festival takes over the entire city: churches, former colleges, commanderies, palaces, and foundations become the settings for exhibitions that engage in a dialogue with Arles' historical heritage. In addition to this institutional selection, numerous independent initiatives, pop-up galleries, book launches, screenings, restaurants, bookstores, and hybrid concepts make photography a true catalyst for encounters. Between emerging artists and established figures, between memory and experimentation, each venue tells a different story. Here is a selection of exhibitions and experiences not to be missed to experience the Rencontres d'Arles beyond the images.
Nomadic glow by Ming Smith
Ming Smith is an American photographer whose work is rooted in travel. Encountering Europe, she cultivates a sensitive, almost ethnographic, perspective on her surroundings. She inspires admiration for her ability to transcend the conventions of the photographic medium. From aesthetically blurred images to photographs enhanced with paint, the Ming Smith exhibition has been installed in Saint Anne's Church, paying homage to the diversity of the American photographer's artistic and authentic landscapes. Growing up in the United States, she has never hidden her identity as a Black American woman throughout her career. Inspired by her encounters, she portrays them with a gentle touch that oscillates between color and black and white. Yet, her work, far from being linear, reveals enduring truths about nostalgia and identity. The notion of identity is not tangible. By representing a Black community, she defuses the stigmas often associated with them. Through her unconventional photographic techniques and experimentation, she offers a complex reflection on the mechanisms of categorization. The photographer captures individuals, and sometimes living beings, such as flamingos, as luminous as they are vulnerable because their evolution is perpetual. " Nomadic Glow" is the visual representation of a vibrant expression, whatever its nature, in perpetual motion.
Ming Smith, Birds , 2022
Nomadic glow
Until October 4
Saint Anne's Church
8 Place de la République, Arles, France
The Dior Photography Prize
The Dior Photography and Visual Arts Prize for Young Talents was created in 2018 by Christian Dior Parfums and is now supported through a partnership with LUMA Arles and the École Supérieure de Photographie (Higher School of Photography). The competition selects ten promising photographers from the world's leading photography schools, each presented with a theme. This year's theme, which the winners had to address, was "Face to Face." Literally translated as "face to face," the expression illustrates our interpretation of introspection through the awareness of our own existence. Among the ten photographers, Akari Takenobu stood out for her fragmented approach to photography. Through collage and composition, the Japanese photographer reveals subtle forms. An attraction to paranormal shapes and experimentation drives her to transcend photographic forms. She addresses the question of "face-to-face" encounters by creating a new, indiscernible form of self: "The scattered fragments are reconstructed into a form evoking a human figure, but one that is no longer identical to the original self." This alternative self-portrait appears as an approach that draws closer to the intangible and the invisible. At once figurative and abstract, it transforms reality into a surreal beauty. Alongside her, photographer Andréa Besset, currently pursuing a Master's degree at HEAR, presents a moving work on the reality of the Armenian population in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, attacked by Azerbaijan in September 2023 and subsequently dissolved on January 1, 2024. We follow Andréa Besset's journey to her country of origin and her growing awareness of the geopolitical threats. Meanwhile, Milena Schilling has undertaken a monumental project, to which she dedicated three years. The raw photographs depict 45 nudes, ranging in age from 18 to 73, in icy waters that can reach temperatures as low as 12 degrees Celsius. The project is a high-level performance aimed at revealing the beauty of the body and the essential nature of water. Meanwhile, Yuan Chen is giving visibility to the 18 million blind or visually impaired people in China.
The Dior Photography Prize
Until October 4
La Lampisterie
35 avenue Victor Hugo, Arles, France
House of love from Shelby Duncan to the Manuel Rivera-Ortiz Foundation
The exhibition tells a story of youth, frivolity, and freedom embraced by a generation of artists. House of Love is a house in California where Shelby Duncan and Saraï Fiszel lived from 2009 to 2015. Nearly 500 artists participated in the vibrant atmosphere of this Californian villa alongside Shelby. Many of them appear in her photographs, captured during euphoric moments between celebrations and vacations. A community took shape within the villa's walls and the numerous parties held there. Unbeknownst to her at the time, Shelby Duncan was already anticipating an aesthetic of sharing that is now ubiquitous on social media. This freedom and lightheartedness contrast sharply with a world that persists in upholding the conventions of political correctness. By celebrating this incandescent youth, the photographer perpetuates a form of authenticity amidst the artifice that confines artists. Attentive to her surroundings and the stories that run through her experiences, Shelby Duncan captures the intensity of certain moments of life stolen by her camera.
Many celebrities such as Louis Garrel, Léa Seydoux, Johnny Hallyday reveal themselves to us, fully clothed in the pool or drunk, in a relaxed manner, like the ordinary humans they are prevented from being.
House of love
Until October 4
Manuel Rivera-Ortiz Foundation
18 Rue de la Calade, Arles, France
The exhibition Being There in the former Mistral college
The exhibition by artists Lee Shulman and Omar Victor Diop carries a critical message about a sad reality, even though the photographs transport us to the heart of convivial moments. Behind the smiles and large tables, segregation is visible between the 1950s and 1970s. Using archival photographs, the duo engaged in a montage process. The installation highlights a new and identical presence in each photograph. Omar Victor Diop's presence, collaged onto these images, appears to us as carefree as it is mysterious. A collection of archival images updated by a new presence. Omar Victor Diop's presence appears to us as carefree as it is mysterious. With a gaze consistently directed at the camera, Omar Victor Diop challenges the viewer, inviting questioning. Wavering between reality and illusion, our gaze questions the legitimacy and the issue of racism in the context in which these photographs were taken. Photographs are not the only things that influence visitors. In the former Mistral school, the walls are crumbling, the colors are fading, and the floor is covered with dead leaves.
The authentic and neglected setting reinforces the harshness of certain realities.
Being There
Until October 4
The former Mistral college
2 Esplanade de la Laïcité, 13200 Arles
Resonances by Baccarat at the Archbishop's Palace
The Archbishop's Palace is an iconic building in Arles, associated since the Middle Ages with the seat of the Church of Arles. Fisheye collaborates with Baccarat on an open-air exhibition of still lifes on semi-opaque surfaces, interacting with the sunlight. The homage to the Baccarat factory is immediately apparent in the exhibition's title: Resonances . Resonance is the immediate and physical effect, particularly sound, of something reverberating on something else. The contact of tools on materials produces a particular and unique sound, characteristic of the House of Baccarat. The photographs bring objects from the shadows to the forefront, revealing their most authentic beauty. Resonance is a photographic journey between two perspectives. Indeed, the photographs of Aliocha Moi and Daphné Lejeune each capture, in their own distinct ways, the beauty of the gesture, the product, and the tool used to create it in the Baccarat factory. The exhibition highlights the austerity of a place, yet the setting in which numerous production techniques allow crystal to shine in all its purity.
Resonances
Archbishop's Palace
Place de la République, Arles, France
Tarmac* Tangier-Le Heading to the Sainte Lucie commandery by Bruno Bouddjelal
Tarmac* Tangier-Cape Town is a daily project on the African continent, a region the photographer had rarely visited before this series. Hung on the walls of a dimly lit room, the vividly colored photographs awaken our curiosity. From a spontaneity and an aesthetic blur emerges an identity, whose invisibility distances us even further from this continent. The few moments of life captured on the fly, of these anonymous individuals, depart from the representations that circulate about this continent. To live intensely is what Bruno Bouddjelal embraced during this journey on the tarmac roads of Africa. As he met people, he abandoned the idea of an ordinary experience to evoke spirituality. "For me, the artistic experience is spiritual because it connects introspection and external perception." The Sainte-Lucie commandery, a vast Provençal residence from the late Middle Ages, hosted, before the photographer's arrival, some important religious and military orders such as the Knights Templar or the Hospitallers of Saint John of Jerusalem.
Tarmac* Tangier-Cape Town
Until October 4
The Sainte Lucie Commandery
8 Rue du Grand Prieuré, 13200 Arles, France
The Erased by Didier Barcelo
Presented in the same space, The Erased Didier Barcelo's work explores the multiple forms of absence. It questions how images can make what seems to have disappeared survive.
With The ErasedDidier Barcelo revisits the history of the thousands of women accused of witchcraft in Scotland between the 16th and 18th centuries. Drawing on research conducted by the University of Edinburgh, the photographer explores the landscapes they traversed. Each photograph is paired with a text inspired by one of these women, transforming the places into silent witnesses to a long-erased memory.
By confronting collective memory and personal memory, this proposal reminds us that photography and cinema do not only document the past: they prolong the presence of those whom time seemed to have erased.
The Erased
Didier Barceló
RAM by Thomas Desoutter
In Mémoire vive , Thomas Desoutter presents a deeply personal debut book, where photography and writing intertwine to explore the mechanisms of memory. Presented at the Rencontres de la Photographie d'Arles, the book follows the return to Corsica of Nabil, her husband, a former foster child who grew up in several foster families on the island before leaving upon reaching adulthood. Long postponed, their reunion with these landscapes brings back fragmented, sometimes contradictory, but never entirely erased memories.
Composed of texts and photographs taken during this journey, Mémoire vive departs from documentary narrative to favor a more sensitive approach. The Corsican landscapes become the silent repositories of a family history marked by abandonment, absence, and reconstruction. Rocks, vegetation, houses, and seascapes bear witness to a memory that persists despite the ravages of time.
Without attempting to fill in the gaps, Thomas Desoutter crafts a narrative where silences occupy as much space as words. The work explores what remains when memories falter and demonstrates that photography, like writing, can become a space for transmission. Mémoire vive thus offers a delicate reflection on resilience, lineage, and the possibility of reconstructing one's history from the traces left by the past.
RAM
Thomas Desoutter
Print is an ephemeral space where the sheer number of encounters is what makes it so charming. For the Rencontres de la Photographie (Photography Encounters), the collective offers an exhibition space, a bookstore, a restaurant, a DJ set with numerous guests, dance performances, and two pop-up bars. More than just a destination, Print has become an ecosystem nestled within the Parc des Ateliers, a stone's throw from LUMA, a towering structure designed by Frank Gehry that hosts researchers and artists to develop and share their projects. Chef Alexis Bijaoui has set up his kitchen in full view of guests, as if to emphasize Print's warm and communal atmosphere. The restaurant brings together food and photography enthusiasts in a completely unstructured setting, open to the outside, without any real walls or seating plans. Spontaneity is key. The menu will evolve with the summer season and the availability of fresh produce, according to the chef's inspiration.
Within the Parc des Ateliers, designer Nara Lee presents her first Family collection from July 8th to 27th. Nara. is a Parisian design studio committed, since 2023, to creating playful and colorful designs that challenge the conformist codes of modern design. The studio explores the place of objects in space and how they can be repurposed depending on the user. Nara Lee is truly attached to the importance of encounters and the small, seemingly insignificant moments found within a family: playing and laughing. In search of these unique moments, Nara Lee has designed six lightweight and colorful pieces that are easily removable and assert themselves in the space without asking permission. Play becomes the essential lever for inhabiting the space. In the evening, the dust on the floor rises to the rhythm of assertive dance steps and the electronic beats of the guest DJs. Among them, Lewis Ofman performs in a sleeveless shirt before an enthusiastic audience. This time, the artist was captivated by Brazilian music, and managed the feat of blending bossa nova with electronic sounds. Before each evening, the dancers of the "Trans(form)anse" group perform a contemporary dance routine.
until July 26
33 Avenue Victor Hugo, Arles
France
Faces x We present
The Faces gallery is setting up shop in Arles, alongside the art platform WePresent, for the duration of the Rencontres de la Photographie. Originally from Marseille, this cultural space fosters a dialogue between the two cities by supporting contemporary photographic projects. Faces and WePresent are collaborating once again on a hybrid project that combines photography, food, and community. The venue is named Cantina , a nod to its past as a restaurant. Today, the space is designed to showcase eight photographic projects discovered by the WePresent curatorial team. Each photographer shares an intimate perspective presented within the pages of exclusive books released for the event. Available for purchase, these books allow visitors to engage in discussions over a Faces x WePresent coffee. The conversations that blossom around these books take place informally over a Faces coffee and help to nurture our creativity and imagination. Faces and WePresent also collaborate in Marseille, in the heart of a dilapidated building in the old Endoume district. The gallery positions itself as a dynamic platform for contemporary photography thanks to WePresent, which commissions various projects by international and emerging voices. The exhibition "Not What You Saw" by visual artist Keerthana Kunnath is currently on display on the gallery's first floor until September 13th. It documents the lives of female bodybuilders living in Kerala, in southern India. The exhibition celebrates a femininity that challenges traditionally ingrained representations.
CANTEEN
Until July 31
15 rue de la Rotonde, Arles, France
Faces
232 rue d'Endoume, Marseille, France
Louis Vuitton Bookstore
As part of its cultural program, Louis Vuitton has taken up residence in the legendary restaurant, Le Buste et L'Oreille . The space has been entirely redesigned according to Louis Vuitton's aesthetic codes to offer a fully immersive experience. The menu features all types of coffee and summer dishes at very reasonable prices. Inside, the wines on the tables and shelves have been replaced by Louis Vuitton City Guides arranged in chromatic order. From Lachlan Bailey's Ibiza City Guide to Paul Kooiker's Bucharest City Guide, they are all available for purchase and reading. To make this experience even more engaging, talks by the photographers themselves are offered in a dedicated area of the restaurant. The Louis Vuitton bookstore has become a true cultural hub in the city of Arles.
Pop-up bookstore — The Bust and the Ear
Until October 5
The Bust and the Ear
3 rue du Président Wilson, Arles, France
Throughout the summer, Arles becomes a city permeated by images. From churches to former colleges, from foundations to pop-up bookstores, each venue offers a new way of seeing the world. The Rencontres de la Photographie reminds us that an image can be simultaneously a testimony, an aesthetic experience, a political act, and a realm of the imagination. By exploring these exhibitions, visitors don't simply discover photographs; they encounter a multitude of narratives that inspire them, introduce them to new perspectives, and cultivate their knowledge to better inhabit reality.
