The standout images from Arles, the world’s top photo festival

Since 1970, the ancient city of Arles in Provence, France has been filled with photography exhibitions every summer. From its many galleries to its municipal buildings, crypt, historical landmarks, churches, and even the local Monoprix supermarché, the city is populated with art for Rencontres d’Arles – one of the world’s leading photography festivals. Honouring the work of photographic luminaries alongside emerging talent, the city-wide event brings together a rich and vast array of perspectives on the world.

This year’s theme is ‘disobedient images’ – an increasingly pertinent topic as the right to protest is eroded, genocide is taking place unhindered, nationalism is on the rise, and the environment is ever-more imperilled. Disobedience towards the status quo has never felt more urgent. Commitment to this theme pervades the entire festival, from Kikuji Kawada’s ghostly images of post-WW2 Japan to Carine Krecké’s exploration of how images and information about conflict are disseminated, chronicled and comprehended.

One of the most anticipated exhibitions in the year’s programme is Nan Goldin’s Stendhal Syndrome (2024). Taking place in the Église Saint-Blaise, the slideshow juxtaposes Goldin’s pictures of classical, renaissance and baroque masterpieces with images from her archive, casting friends and lovers as mythological characters as she narrates stories from Ovid’s Metamorphosis. The title refers to the psychological term inspired by the eponymous 19th-century French author’s description of his emotional and physical collapse when faced with an overwhelming density of beautiful art. In the cool of the dark church, heavy with the scent of incense, Goldin’s slideshow is equally stirring, as long-lost moments and people from her past are held aloft alongside timeless and transcendent works of art against the soundtrack of ancient, wise tales. And it is overwhelming; a distilled, elevated species of beauty and sadness. Heartbreaking, also, because one can’t help but consider the longevity of the artworks in contrast to the brevity of human lives.

Todd Hido’s The Light from Within at Espace Van Gogh is deeply cinematic and poetic. Known for his atmospheric photographs of fog-bound landscapes, isolated figures and melancholy, lonely houses, his pictures have an eerie, Hitchcockian quality of suspense and mystery. Elsewhere, the Louis Stettner retrospective brings together nearly 150 images from the prolific photographer’s expansive career. Born in 1922, Stettner’s practice encompassed seismic cultural and political shifts in the US and Europe, from the Pacific front and the fallout of Hiroshima to the beat generation in the 1960s, and the feminist, antiracist, and anti-poverty struggles of the 1970s. Until the 2000s, he continued to capture the street life of New York and Paris. Throughout The World of Louis Stettner (2019-2026), the late great photographer’s pictures convey a continued curiosity towards the world around him and a generosity and warmth for the anachronisms and peculiarities of people.

Alongside established names, Rencontres d’Arles also makes space for rising photographers. The Discovery Award Louis Roederer Foundation brings together emerging image-makers presenting work on the theme ‘An Assembly of Sceptics’. The work here expresses a wariness towards the dominant narratives. Daniel Mebarek’s Foto Gratis was shot at Feria 16 de Julio – a bustling open-air street market in Bolivia. He set up a photo booth where people could come and have their portraits taken for free, creating an intersection between formal portraiture and everyday life; between the notion of portraiture’s colonial history of classification and typology, and ways to disrupt the Western gaze.

Investigating memories from her childhood in Cairo using photomontage and journalling, Heba Khalifa’s Tigers Eye explores religious and familial repression and the female body. Here, family photos take on an ominous note as we glimpse layers of secrecy and shades of hidden domestic abuse. In some Arabic countries, ‘tiger’s eye’ is a slur to describe a defiant female gaze. Khalifa reappropriates the term as a heroic, inviscerating lens highlighting the terrors and traumas of subdugation.

Meanwhile, Julie Joubert, the winner of this year’s Discovery Award Louis Roederer Foundation award, explores migration, hypermasculinity and heterosocial behaviour in her studio of the French Foreign Legion – men who have relinquished their countries, families and cultures in the quest to obtain French citizenship. It is a study of the rigours of military life and the communality of their new realities against the backdrop of the uncertainty that hangs over their future.

Rencontres d’Arles runs until 5 October, 2025. Visit the gallery above for a close look.