The 56th edition of France's renowned Rencontres d'Arles photography festival is revolutionizing how we understand photographic history through its theme "Disobedient Images." This year's festival, featuring more than 40 exhibitions, focuses on the investigation of archives and their power to disrupt canonical narratives while reinventing traditional photographic storytelling.
The festival serves as a precursor to an even more significant cultural event: France's upcoming Bicentennial of Photography, scheduled for 2026-27. This celebration will commemorate the 200th anniversary of the first image obtained through light - Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's iconic "View from the Window at Le Gras." Rather than being a nationalist enterprise or utopian recovery of disappearing images, the festival represents a vibrant call to rethink photography as a medium in constant renewal.
The concept that photographs can influence historical revisionism connects the festival to a broader cultural mission that began after World War II, when many European cultural festivals were launched. Between 1946 and 1960, events like the Cannes Film Festival, the Avignon Theatre Festival, and the Antibes Jazz Festival were established. Photography found its place in historic venues - churches and cloisters - to assert new and revolutionary messages.
The Rencontres d'Arles continues this tradition by inviting artists and curators to work within spaces that evoke the long history of human recording and documentation. One of the most striking examples is the Cloister of St. Trophime, where powerful historical connections resonate. Artist and activist Nan Goldin presents "Stendhal Syndrome" (2024) inside the ancient Church of St. Blaise, asserting the power of seduction and autobiography in an increasingly dark and complex world.
On July 8, Goldin projected her digital slideshow "Memory Lost" (2019-20) in the Roman Theatre, accompanied by author Édouard Louis reading text in the ancient outdoor space. Louis's declaration made the stones "screech and shiver" as he stated: "We think that photography shows destruction of this world and things will change, but we are wrong, what worked in the past is no longer working today." Through both projection and life, Goldin moves the conversation forward, questioning photography's realism and effectiveness while seeking answers about its political power today.
The festival's exhibitions on Indigenous Australian artists and Brazilian photo archives provocatively raise these important questions. "On Country: Photography from Australia" at the Church of St. Anne presents a collective excavation into the meaning of "country" beyond geographical borders, creating an intimate dimension that combines photography's material quality with ritual sounds and evocative sculptural installations. Large fabric cyanotypes hang from the church's Gothic vault, created by Ngugi/Quandamooka artist Sonja Carmichael, who printed traces of various elements used by local communities, from meal remnants to natural objects like shells.
Brenda Croft's large prints of Barangaroo First Nation women are created using tintypes, a 19th-century photographic process whose haunting identity emerges anew in this context. A soundscape broadcast throughout the exhibition features an intergenerational First Nations choir composed of Menero-Ngarigo and Dhurga-Yuin singers, who traveled across the world to perform during the festival's opening week in July.
A similar effort to draw new work from buried narratives and traditional crafts characterizes Thyago Nogueira's ambitious exhibition "Ancestral Futures: Brazilian Contemporary Scene." This show employs a wide range of strategies - from photomontage to AI, photo-roman, performance, and video - to engage with the repatriation of Indigenous history. The packed installation inside the 17th-century architecture of the chapel of Trinitaires further enhances the project's decolonizing spirit.
The festival most effectively encourages surprise, puzzlement, and disorientation when it proves that photographic archives expand when their images are not codified or canonized. The vernacular images from Marion and Philippe Jacquier's collection in "In Praise of Anonymous Photography" are disobedient precisely because they drift away from anything previously seen, generating narratives that intrigue and trouble viewers. The show displays anonymous autochromes, an early-20th-century color photography process, creating sheer mystery in its presentation.
Particularly compelling is a personal photo album in which a lover marked sites of amorous encounters and wrote about urban margins, corners, windows, and metro stops in Paris - creating a literary landscape that seems surrealist but is purely autobiographical. This type of vernacular photography challenges traditional notions of what constitutes important or valuable photographic work.
In another kind of puzzle, Carine Krecké, winner of the Luxembourg Photography Award, invites viewers to examine the digital mapping of Google Earth in "Losing North." Presented on digital screens inside the chapel of Charité, the project explores the violence of the Assad regime in Syria through a digital blur of images depicting the destruction of the town of Arbin, north of Damascus, alongside the artist's narration of a personal detective search that has lost tangible bearings.
This investigative journalism project stumbles into a digital network where the visible appears and disappears, where reality becomes abstract, and the artist can neither grasp nor contain the immensity of war. The images in "Losing North" hit close to home, reflecting the daily experience of our screens, the obliteration caused by conflict and violence, and the global Google Map that sees everything and then deletes what it sees. "How to view war today?" asks Krecké in a recording, turning to theories by French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman for answers. She quotes: "If it is too far, you lose sight; if it is too close, you lose vision."
The abstraction of war addresses the key challenge raised by most projects in this festival: how to unpack and reshape what has become unclear, uncertain, and seemingly irrelevant. Niépce's image, captured in 1826 at Le Gras and now faded and almost invisible, might yet offer new ground for these interrogations about photography's role in contemporary society and historical understanding.
Les Rencontres d'Arles: Disobedient Images continues at various locations throughout Arles, France, through October 5. The festival is directed by Christoph Wiesner and Aurélie de Lanlay, continuing the event's tradition of challenging conventional approaches to photographic presentation and interpretation.
