Things To Do At The Rencontres d'Arles 2025 And Beyond

Explore the Rencontres d'Arles opening week with our comprehensive agenda, which we update daily to bring you the most current information on the official program and all related events we love.

Over the past 56 years, the Rencontres d'Arles has established itself as a meeting point for photography enthusiasts and professionals alike, and an observatory of our world. Throughout the city, day and night, photographers and curators meet the public at evening screenings, exhibition tours, debates, book fairs, portfolio reviews, and lectures.

Our team was in Arles for the entire opening week, visiting exhibitions and enjoying the festival's atmosphere. It was a pleasure to connect in person with the many friends, alumni, artists, and community members who joined us for an informal aperitivo on Wednesday 9 July at La Croisière.

1. Explore The Exhibitions /

Now that we've had a chance to process everything we saw, we’re happy to share our favorite exhibitions from this year's lineup. Curated by Vanessa Desclaux, the exhibition They Stray They Persist They Thunder features new work by Agnès Geoffray, stemming from research into the archives of French "preservation schools." These institutions confined young girls deemed "deviant" or "uneducable" from the late 19th to mid-20th century for defying social norms. Through fictional photographic portraits and textual works that stage gestures of resistance and escape, Geoffray explores their revolts and aspirations for emancipation. By placing her art alongside historical documents, the exhibition poetically reclaims the stories of these marginalized girls, giving powerful voice to their struggle against a controlling, prison-like regime. It invites us to rethink today, in a poetic and political way, the marginalized existence of these young girls, whose bodies were subjected to the sanitary, moral, medical and educational control of a prison regime that refused to speak its name.

This year, the festival is honouring Australia and Brazil with several group exhibitions bringing a dialogue between contemporary and emerging art, vernacular photography and modernism. Ancestral Futures presents at Église des Trinitaires a bold new generation of artists using photography, video, collage, and AI to examine contemporary Brazilian society and history. By reinterpreting visual archives and traditions, the exhibition curated by Thyago Nogueira offers a profound reflection on memory and identity. With fierce irony and radical imagination, the featured artists dispute, remix and unarchive official histories to denounce the construction of stereotypes, the silencing of minorities and the violence against Afro-Brazilian, immigrant, indigenous and LGBTQIA+ peoples.

Curated by Claartje van Dijk at Espace Monoprix, Diana Markosian's Father is an intimate portrayal that relays the complex journey of a father and daughter trying to rebuild the emotional foundation they once shared. Through documentary photographs, music, video, and archival images, Markosian explores her father’s absence, their difficult reconciliation, and the shared emptiness of their prolonged estrangement. Fifteen years after she last saw him, with no picture for remembrance and no address to guide her, Markosian set out to find her father in Armenia. Their meeting powerfully embodied the weight of lost time, as she came face to face with a father who was now a stranger.

In the same space, curated by César González-Aguirre from selection to installation, the 2025 Louis Roederer Foundation Discovery Award continues its exploration of contemporary photography at the Espace Monoprix. This year's featured artists include Octavio Aguilar, Julie Joubert, Heba Khalifa, Daniel Mebarek, Musuk Nolte, Zuzana Pustaiová, and Denis Serrano. During the opening week, a jury presented Octavio Aguilar as the prize recipient with Tajëëw, ja tsa´any (Tajëëw, The Snake), with special mentions for artist Heba Khalifa and her work Tiger's Eye (عین النمرة), while visitors had the opportunity to vote Julie Joubert's Patria Nostra for the Public Award.

Additionally, among this year's exhibited artists is Nan Goldin, winner of the 2025 Kering | Women In Motion Award for photography. An emblematic figure of the festival, Goldin returns with Stendhal Syndrome, a new work focusing on the bonds of family and friendship, and exhibited at Église Saint-Blaise. The work juxtaposes images of Classical, Renaissance, and Baroque masterpieces with intimate portraits of friends and family taken over the last twenty years. Structured around Ovid's Metamorphoses, Goldin casts her loved ones as mythological figures, while her own voiceover accompanies a moving soundtrack by Soundwalk Collective and a piece by Mica Levi. Stendhal Syndrome asserts the timeless existence of her community, giving its members the stature they deserve.

Exhibited at Salle Henri Comte, Keisha Scarville’s series Alma/Mama's Clothes began in the wake of her mother’s death in 2015. She turned to her mother’s clothes - remarkable transmitters of memory with their unique capacity to store the shape and scent of the wearer as well as transport us back to the specifics of time and place - using them as the material and inspiration for her photographs. Drawing on influences like 19th-century spirit photography and the Yoruba tradition of Egungun, her enigmatic and poetic images collapse the past and present, transforming personal grief into a visual exploration of memory and presence.

In the 1960s, within the Brazilian favelas, an artistic movement began to emerge, led by photographers who lived and worked in the very neighborhoods whose daily life they sought to capture. Conceived in 2015 by artist Guilherme Cunha and exhibited at La Croisière, Retratistas Do Morro is rooted in a collaborative sharing of knowledge, blending photographic research with community engagement. This extensive archive, comprising 250,000 photographs, invites reflection on the ways our gaze evolves through the reappraisal of this cultural legacy. The exhibition pays tribute to two key photographers of the period: João Mendes and Afonso Pimenta. For nearly sixty years, they have documented the lives and memories of the residents of the Serra community, one of Brazil’s largest favelas, located in Belo Horizonte.

2. Enjoy Photobooks, Performances & Talks /

France PhotoBook is organizing the fourth edition of the Arles Books Fair, taking place at the École nationale supérieure de la photographie and the Collège Saint-Charles. Dedicated to the richness and variety of publishing practices, this event will bring together over eighty international publishing houses from Tuesday 8 to Saturday 12 July, 1pm - 7:30pm, with authors and photographers signing their books from 5:30pm. You'll have the opportunity to meet publishers including Ciao Press, Overlapse, Gost, Kult Books, KWY Ediciones, Fotohof>Edition, Spector, Tipi Bookshop, XYZ Books, Ediciones Anómalas, Editorial RM, Leporello Books & Grani Edizioni, Lithuanian Photobooks, TBW Books, Sun/Sun, Trans Photographic Press, and many more, across the two locations. We recommend looking at the festival's website for detailed information.

Librairie du Palais is back with MIRAGE, offering an opportunity to engage with a community deeply invested in the art of photography books and to explore a diverse range of thoughtful, independent projects. This year's program includes a series of events organized by La.ima that will bring together artists, photographers, and publishers from Latin America and the Caribbean for a collective discussion on photography as a political, poetic, and territorial act. Oleñka Carrasco and Ioana Mello will lead a conversation with Jordan Beal, Sylvie Bonnot, Cédrick-Isham Calvados, José Diniz, Éline Gourgues, Marisol Mendez, Mariana Rettore, Maximiliano Tineo, Ricardo Tokugawa, Marianne & Kasia Wąsowska, and Bruno Zorzal.

3. Join The Portfolio Reviews /

For over 15 years, the Photo Folio Review has organized portfolio reviews during the festival's opening week. This event is aimed at professional photographers, photography students, and experienced amateurs with an established background in photography. The reviews are conducted by international experts from the world of photography, including editors, curators, institution directors, agency heads, gallery owners, collectors, critics, and artistic directors. Among them, PhMuseum Founder and Artistic Director, Giuseppe Oliverio, will be conducting reviews and meeting with artists on the afternoon of Wednesday 9 July.

4. Experience The Festival After Dark /

While the days in Arles are dedicated to the focused viewing of exhibitions, the night is a space for dynamic and collective encounters. This is when the festival expands beyond the gallery walls, transforming courtyards and squares into lively hubs of visual culture. From curated documentary screenings to immersive projection trails and DJ sets, the evening program is an essential part of the Arles experience, offering different perspectives and unexpected discoveries.

Since 2019, Les Rencontres d'Arles and the online documentary platform Tënk have partnered to present an evening documentary film series. From July 8th to 11th, the Cour Fanton transforms into an open-air cinema from 10pm to midnight, showcasing a selection of new and rare films. The screening program includes Balomania by Sissel Morell Dargis, Lisière by Eva Tourrent, Fabulous by Audrey Jean-Baptiste, and Adieu Sauvage by Sergio Guataquira Sarmiento.

The Lodz Fotofestiwal collective and the Institut Polonais de Paris invite you to discover Polish photography during the Festival Off Arles. The Polish Paradise Night is an evening of screenings dedicated to Polish photography and music proposed by Łódź's Fotofestiwal with DJ sets by Disko Zakvas and VJ set by Tom Skof. Screenings will feature Polish contemporary photography, FUTURE talents of Fotofestiwal, rethinking Eastern Europe. The dancefloor will wait for you on Thursday 10 July from 10pm to 1am at Espace Mistral.

On the same evening, the historic Roquette district of Arles will transform into an open-air gallery for La Nuit de la Roquette. This grand celebration of the image, in all its diverse forms, will animate the neighborhood with photographs and projections in the streets and on the facades of buildings, filling the squares with art from 7pm to 1am. This year's edition holds special significance as it collaborates with the Musée départemental Arles antique, which will be celebrating its 30th anniversary, promising a fusion of contemporary imagery and historical heritage.

La Nuit de l’Année (The Night Of The Year) will take place at the Quartier de la Cavalerie, Place Voltaire, and Place Lamartine, offering a captivating visual walk, showcasing a continuous loop of some forty photographic proposals on large screens. Alongside the projections, the night will be energized by performances and DJ sets, with Konbini presenting a carte blanche program featuring the Maraboutage collective, Marara Kelly, and DouceSœur. Attendees can also enjoy food trucks and bars throughout the evening, creating a vibrant celebration of photography. The appointment is on Saturday 12 July, from 8:30pm to 2am.

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La Embajada, 74 Rue Portagnel /

An artist-run platform led by Ignacio Navas, Emma A. Marty, and Jonàs Forchini, La Embajada returns to Arles for its second edition, showcasing contemporary photography works created within the Spanish context. Exhibited projects include Clepsydra by Juan Couder is an exploration of photographic matter as a body vulnerable to time, and Andrea Durán's Madriguera is a chronicle of how generational identity intertwines with the transformation of the environment. Gestures Of Shelter by Fernanda del Barrio is a series of ephemeral actions to inhabit the unstable, while A River Without Bridges by Andrés Solla explores the consequences of a historical event that led 1,200 people to commit suicide in Demmin at the end of World War II. The exhibition will be open from 8 to 12 July, 12pm-8pm. Plus, a special vernissage will take place on Friday 11 July.

Festival Off Arles / Various locations

The OFF Arles Festival is a collateral event for photography lovers, offering a free and inclusive platform for both emerging and established artists to share their work. Running alongside the main festival, the OFF energizes Arles' cultural scene with an eclectic program of exhibitions, screenings, workshops, and events that bring the entire city to life. The 2025 edition will feature over 120 exhibitions, four evenings combining DJ sets with video projections, four roundtable discussions on contemporary photography, and a wide range of hands-on workshops.

Archevêché by Fisheye / Place de la République

From 7 to 12 July 2025, Fisheye, with the support of the City of Arles and Canon, will take over the Cour de l'Archevêché. Aimed at celebrating emerging and contemporary photography, the program will feature an open-air group exhibition highlighting contemporary surrealist and women's photography. The event will also include talks exploring key questions about the image, portfolio reviews, DJ sets, social events, and workshops.

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The 56th edition of Les Rencontres d'Arles runs from 7th July to 5h October 2025, in Arles, France, with a wide program of events taking place during the opening week, 7-13 July. For more information visit their website.