Rencontres d’Arles, the influential photography festival in southern France, returns with “Disobedient Images” and a slate of shows you should not miss.
Each summer Arles hands itself to Rencontres d’Arles, now in its 56th year and one of the world’s most influential photography festivals. Held annually in the Provençal town of Arles in southern France, the festival turns the city into a stage for images that challenge and provoke. This year it runs July 7 to October 5 and “Disobedient Images” takes over churches, supermarkets, factories and even a crypt.
Nothing is off-limits this year. Historic chapels hum with slideshows, a former supermarket holds large-scale prints, and side streets lead to pop-up book fairs and late screenings in the Roman theatre. Portfolio reviews run hot. Debates about ethics, activism and who gets to tell which stories spill from panels into bars. It feels less like a week of openings and more like a season-long stress test of what photography can still do.
Nan Goldin: Stendhal Syndrome
Nan Goldin’s 25-minute slideshow pairs portraits of her friends and lovers with Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces she photographed on years of museum visits to the Louvre, the Met, and beyond. Framed by her own narration and an uneasy score by Soundwalk Collective and Mica Levi, the sequence casts her circle as characters from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, staking their place in art history. It peaks with Stendhal’s legendary fainting spell in Florence, a reminder that overwhelming beauty can still knock you flat.
On Country: Photography from Australia
A first for Arles and long overdue. Curators Elias Redstone, Kimberley Moulton (Yorta Yorta), Pippa Milne and Brendan McCleary assemble Indigenous and non-Indigenous voices to rethink who gets to picture “Country”. Landscapes, archives, protest images and personal mythologies sit side by side, insisting that land is story, law and memory all at once.
Camille Lévêque: In Search of The Father
Lévêque turns a missing father into a case file you can feel. Photographs, family artifacts and wry asides stack up into something between detective work and diary. The project comes with a delpire co book, handy if you want to live with the work beyond the gallery.
Yves Saint Laurent and Photography
From Irving Penn to Annie Leibovitz, the couturier’s image world is laid out with museum-grade polish. Curated by Simon Baker with Elsa Janssen and drawn from the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris archives, the show makes it clear: fashion and photography have always been in lockstep. You see how YSL understood the camera, and how the camera understood him.
Claudia Andujar: In the Place of the Other
Decades of work with Brazil’s Yanomami people anchor this survey, organized with Instituto Moreira Salles as part of the France–Brazil 2025 season. Curator Thyago Nogueira foregrounds Andujar’s activism as much as her aesthetics. The images burn with urgency, but they also teach you how to look with care.
Kourtney Roy: The Tourist
Roy plays the lead in her own cinematic stills, all lacquered surface and lurking unease. Glamour is the lure, not the point. The exhibition is paired with her book The Tourist and backed by Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire and Project 2.0, so there is plenty to dive into if you are hooked.
Georges Rousse: Utopia
Two new site-specific interventions join a concise look back at the Abbaye de La Celle. Rousse paints architecture so the image clicks into place only from one spot. Miss the angle and it is abstract paint. Find it and the room snaps into focus.
Elsa and Johanna: Lost and Found
Inside a retrofuturistic set that feels equal parts ultracontemporary showroom and time capsule, the duo pushes you to look again. Earlier series surface through threads of nostalgia, escape, solitude, gender play and staged domestic life, with new and rarely shown photographs taking the lead. Multiple sightlines keep the read shifting.
Construction Deconstruction Reconstruction
Brazilian modernist photography between 1939 and 1964 gets the spotlight it deserves. São Paulo’s Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante is the anchor, but the show broadens into a portrait of a city racing into modernity. Curators Helouise Costa and Marcella Legrand Marer link it to the wider France–Brazil 2025 program, underscoring how cross-country the dialogue is this year.
Todd Hido: The Light From Withinn
Hido’s fogged windshields, lonely roads and moody interiors are here, but so are collaged family photos that soften the chill. The pairing argues for tenderness in bleak times. Produced with Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire and tied to a new Textuel book, the show feels both familiar and newly raw.
Rencontres d’Arles 2025 runs from July 7 to October 5 across venues in Arles, France. Full program at rencontres-arles.com.
