As everything pushes toward simplification, division and reduction, the 57th edition of the Rencontres d’Arles creates a space for complexity and attentiveness – not to artificially soften the violence of reality, but to bring out its depth, and to face a sometimes unsettling world while continuing to find beauty, connection and freedom in it. Photography has a rare ability to chart new paths. As an essential medium, it shows what goes unnoticed, what endures, what circulates, what is passed on and what connects. By bringing together history and more intimate narratives, photography makes it possible to see the world differently.
This shift in perspective runs through the work of major figures such as William Klein, honored by the Rencontres on the centenary of his birth and known for continually challenging forms and conventions; it also allows us to rediscover Martine Barrat, whose powerful and distinctive work takes us into the marginalized neighborhoods of the Goutte d’Or in Paris and 1970s New York, from Harlem to the Bronx; Ming Smith, whose independent and poetic vision broke new ground in American photography; and finally, Harry Gruyaert, who moves us through a vibrant, color-saturated urban sequence of tightly composed images, from New York to Zanzibar, via Paris, Tokyo and Mumbai.
A new map of the world emerges from a focus on movement, routes, passages and lines of tension across these territories. Between Africa and the Mediterranean, between inherited borders and movements toward emancipation, artists reimagine geographies. Bruno Boudjelal reminds us that images can sometimes emerge from the meeting between an external landscape and inner life. His work does not document, rather it shapes an experience, bringing out something more subtle, where spirituality, memory and sensation come together. In Anne-Lise Broyer’s images, the Mediterranean appears, in turn, as a place inhabited by different layers of time, a space of waiting and projection. In Algeria, the suppressed memory of the Black Decade gradually surfaces in Katia Kameli’s long-term work. Presented as part of the Saison Méditerranée 2026, these three exhibitions show the different faces of the Mediterranean basin.
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What connects these projects, different as they are in form, historical periods and geography, is perhaps a shared attention to processes of transformation: narratives that shift, memories that resurface, forms of life that persist, images that – far from freezing the world – help us see it anew.
Together with Aurélie de Lanlay and the festival team, I look forward to welcoming you to Arles for the 57th edition of the Rencontres d’Arles, opening on July 6 and sharing the full program.
Rencontres d’Arles 2026
July 6 – October 4, 2026 / Rencontres d’Arles
