ARLES: Les Rencontres de la Photographie

Since 1970, it’s been the place where big names, emerging voices, and archival gems all meet in order to show what photography can do: how it documents, disturbs, questions, and remembers.

Curated by Thyago Nogueira, Ancestral Futures brings together a powerful generation of Brazilian artists who look to the past to envision radically new futures. Through photography, video, collage, and even AI, they rewrite official narratives and reclaim visual space for Indigenous, Afro-Brazilian, immigrant, and queer identities.

Artists like Denilson Baniwa, Ventura Profana, and Gê Viana challenge narratives with their raw, luminous, defiant works. They reuse and transform archives to challenge what’s been erased and to create new ways of showing identity, beauty, and resistance.

From Celia Tupinambá’s work with ancestral clothing to Paulo Nazareth’s powerful self-portraits, Ancestral Futures is a way to look at how Brazil is rethinking its past to imagine new futures. One of the must-see shows in Arles this year.

In Tiger’s Eye, Egyptian artist Heba Khalifa revisits her childhood in Cairo to explore how memory and trauma shape identity. Working with family photos, journaling, and photomontage, she questions the role of family and religion in reinforcing gender norms and silence.

The title reclaims a phrase used as an insult in Arab societies to describe a bold female gaze. Khalifa uses it to challenge the structures that normalise gender-based violence. Her images explore how photography can become a space for healing and a way to speak out. A direct and personal project, Tiger’s Eye addresses the impact of patriarchy from within the domestic sphere and the power of looking back to move forward.

With Patria Nostra, Julie Joubert explores how masculinity is shaped within the French Foreign Legion, a military unit made up of foreign nationals who enlist under a new identity, often leaving behind their countries, languages, and pasts. Through intimate portraits, she explores the balance between individuality and the strict codes of uniformity, discipline, and performance that define life in the Legion.

Her work focuses on the rituals of discipline, hygiene, and performance to show how identity is negotiated in military life. These men share youth, foreignness, and a suspended sense of belonging. For Joubert, the Legion becomes a lens to question how masculinity is built and what it costs.

In Sauvages [Wild], Swiss photographer Laurence Kubski explores the fragile coexistence between humans and wildlife in Fribourg, a region in western Switzerland. Over the course of a year, she documented conservation efforts, hunting rituals, and tracking techniques, capturing everything from drone scans for hidden fawns to the tools of taxidermists.

In this documentary and staged photography, Laurence also weaves in her own childhood memories of growing up in the Swiss countryside. The result is both intimate and critical, raising a central question: in a world of constant monitoring, does the wild still exist?

A thoughtful, visually rich reflection on how Western culture engages with nature in a world that is between the line of care and control.

In Alma, Brooklyn-based artist Keisha Scarville reflects on the loss of her mother back in 2015 through photography. Using Alma’s clothing and personal objects, she creates intimate portraits, some of them in black-and-white, where her own body becomes a vessel for memory and presence.

Inspired by spirit photography and ancestral traditions like Egungun, Scarville explores how grief reshapes identity and space. The faded textiles echo the emotional weight of absence, while each image becomes both a tribute and a quiet act of resistance in letting go.

A thoughtful, personal series that gives visual form to mourning and the lingering presence of loss.

Kourtney Roy’s The Tourist revisits the artist’s signature self-portraiture through scenes that flirt with artifice and detachment. A snorkel mask meets a lit cigarette, heels teeter on wet pavement, and temple facades collapse into kitsch. Roy builds a universe that looks familiar but doesn’t quite behave as expected. The colours, the compositions, the expressions—everything feels rehearsed and left slightly odd. Holidays à la Triangle of Sadness. 

This exhibition doesn’t mimic the curated holiday photo but gives us a brand-new take on it with Roy’s recognisable filmic approach and characteristic colour palette. Roy captures the gap between what we remember and what we actually lived, holding onto the awkward, the stalled, and the oddly placed. The fantasy of escape is there, but so is the faint weight of reality, sneaking into every staged corner. The Tourist suggests we don’t travel to forget, but to collect fictions we wish had been real.

The winner of the Kering Women In Motion Awards for Photography 2025, Nan Goldin, creates a hypnotic parallel between classical art and her personal pantheon of friends and lovers. The slideshow weaves together museum imagery captured over two decades with portraits taken in the intimacy of her inner circle, merging sacred and everyday beauty. From the Louvre to the Galleria Borghese, Goldin looks in her photographs for emotional resonance, drawing out a visual echo between centuries-old mythologies and the fragile, contemporary lives around her.

Inspired by Metamorphoses, Goldin recasts her community into figures like Galatea and Orpheus, shifting the scale of recognition toward those historically left out of grandeur. Her narration, layered with original compositions by Soundwalk Collective and Mica Levi, intensifies the emotional rhythm of the piece. The work builds quietly toward the retelling of Stendhal’s collapse before a Botticelli in Florence, using that collapse as a way to assert the power of chosen family, desire, and recognition.

Octavio Aguilar’s Tajëëw Its Kontoy, presented by PARALLEL Oaxaca and awarded the 2025 Discovery Award by the Louis Roederer Foundation, brings ancestral memory into dialogue with contemporary image-making. Rooted in the oral histories of the Ayuuk people of Santiago Zacatepec, the work intertwines mythology, language, and photography as a means of cultural resistance. Guided by the stories of his grandmother and community elders, Aguilar reframes Mixe identity through portraits that blur time and reassert presence.

Using his friends as stand-ins for Tajëëw and Kontoy, ancestors of the Ayuuk, Aguilar constructs scenes that flow between landscape and lore. Photography becomes a ritual act, part of a wider audiovisual installation that carries the weight of history while refusing to be confined by it. Language, too, is central—Ayuuk, more than spoken, is felt throughout the work, reclaiming space in a world where difference is often flattened.

On Country: Photography from Australia foregrounds the cultural presence of First Peoples by tracing a constellation of voices connected to land, ancestry, and self-determination. Presented at Église Sainte-Anne and co-produced with PHOTO Australia, the exhibition, formed by more than twenty photographers, brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists whose practices respond to the living spirit of Country not just as a backdrop or theme, but as kin, teacher, and guide. 

Through the lens, these artists move across intergenerational knowledge, memory, and resistance, reframing photography as an act of care and responsibility. The exhibition draws a sharp contrast with photography’s colonial legacy, repositioning the medium as a site for truth-telling and cultural sovereignty. With over 60,000 years of uninterrupted First Nations presence colliding with two centuries of settler occupation, On Country captures the fractures and continuities that shape contemporary Australia. The artists here document, inhabit, invoke, and shift the ground.

Yves Saint Laurent’s enduring legacy owes much to the visionary photographers who captured his work and persona with striking clarity and artistry. This exhibition brings together over eighty photographs that trace the couturier’s evolution from the 1950s through the early 2000s. Images by legends such as Irving Penn or Richard Avedon reveal moments of bold innovation and quiet intimacy, revealing not just garments but the spirit of each era. Through these portraits and runway shots, Saint Laurent is captured as he was: a figure whose mind challenged and reshaped fashion’s boundaries.

Beyond the photographs, the exhibition offers an intimate glimpse into the behind-the-scenes world of the House of YSL. Archives filled with contact sheets, advertising notebooks, campaign catalogues, press clippings, and personal snapshots illuminate how photography was woven into the fabric of the brand’s identity and communication. These artefacts show how Saint Laurent engaged deeply with the photographic medium as a form of storytelling that captured the nuance and evolution of his craft. Together, these materials invite reflection on the dialogue between designer and photographer that helped define modern fashion imagery.

This display, co-produced by the Rencontres d’Arles and the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris, stands as a testament to Saint Laurent’s revolutionary impact. It situates his work within the larger histories of both fashion and photography, offering visitors a richly layered experience that celebrates a designer whose influence continues to reverberate today.