ルネ・ダール・エ・アールの見るべき最高の写真展示会

On July 7, the photography world descended once again on the historic city of Arles in the south of France for the 55th edition of its esteemed annual photography festival, Les Rencontres d’Arles. On show until early October, this year’s offering is particularly good, and particularly poignant. Its overarching theme is “disobedient images” – the kinds of pictures that, in an age where mainstream media holds such sway, are needed now more than ever.

Here, we select eight of the festival’s highlights (and our top pick from the coinciding Off programme), spanning a new Nan Goldin slideshow and a poignant exploration of grief by Keisha Scarville through a survey of Brazilian modernist photography and an exquisitely curated show of work by contemporary Australian image-makers.

Nan Goldin: Stendhal Syndrome at Église Saint-Blaise [lead image]

The European debut of a new work by Nan Goldin, this year’s winner of the Kering Women in Motion Award, is well worth the queue. Screened in a tiny, darkened church, Stendhal Syndrome is a 30-minute slideshow that pairs Goldin’s candid photographs of her friends and lovers with those of famous classical, Renaissance and baroque artworks, captured by the American artist during her visits to some of the world’s most famous museums. Goldin provides a voiceover, telling tales from Ovid’s Metamorphosis as the clever combination of images show life mirroring art (or vice versa), recasting the members of Goldin’s inner-circle as mythological beings. So often dubbed “diaristic”, the photographer’s radically raw oeuvre here reveals itself as high art, just as worthy of reverence as that which prompted Stendhal, the French novelist and critic’s famous collapse.

On Country: Photography From Australia at Église Sainte-Anne 

The hot but impressive environs of the Église Sainte-Anne, the church overlooking Arles’ main square, the Place de la République, make an apt setting for a brilliant exhibition of Australian photography. Featuring more than 200 photographic works by 17 artists and collectives, the show considers what it means to be “on Country”, a term embodied by First Peoples in Australia to describe “the lands, waterways, seas and cosmos to which they are connected”.

Highlights include Warakurna Superheroes by Tony Albert and David C Collins, a series of compelling portraits of children from a remote First Nations community. Made in collaboration with the kids themselves, it finds them donning handmade superhero costumes and striking powerful poses against the arid backdrop of their hometown. Indigenous Congolese artist Wani Toaishara’s tender portraits of members of Melbourne’s African diaspora serve to challenge preconceptions about the African experience in Australia. While Lisa Sorgini’s beautiful landscapes are lyrical, quietly unsettling meditations on the climate emergency, imbued with her fears for the future courtesy of the inclusion of her own young children in many of the works. 

Todd Hido: The Light From Within at Espace Van Gogh

In the upper storey of the idyllic Espace Van Gogh, a transportive, typically atmospheric exhibition by the American photographer Todd Hido makes for memorable viewing. Pictures of lonely houses and unpopulated landscapes abound, often captured through the windscreen of the photographer’s car – an effect that lends the scenes the hazy softness of a memory. Melancholic and mystical, these hang alongside collages of vintage family photographs – Hido’s reminder that, in these troubling times, it is more important than ever to “to strengthen the bonds of love with those around us, and find the potential for solace and tenacity in even the most fragile of situations”.

Letizia Battaglia: Always in Search of Life at Chapelle Saint-Martin Du Méjan

The late Sicilian photographer Letizia Battaglia is the focus of an enthralling survey at the Chapelle Saint-Martin Du Méjan, which reveals the full extent of her remarkable talent as a photojournalist and artist. Particularly notable are the photographs she took in 1970s Palermo while working for a local newspaper. At the time, the city was overrun with Mafia-related violence, and Battaglia, with Weegee-like dedication to the cause, brought viewers into the heart of the drama with a cinematographic knack for composition and timing. But she was keen to show other sides of the city too: children playing in the streets, lovers in mourning, religious festivities in action, revealing all the complexities of a place where beauty and bloodshed exist side by side.

Raphaëlle Peria and Fanny Robin: Crossing the Missing Fragment at Cloître Saint-Trophime

In a shady room off the Romanesque Saint-Trophime cloister, visitors are ushered on a dreamlike voyage along the Canal du Midi in the south of France, thanks to the French artist Raphaëlle Peria and curator Fanny Robin. Winners of this year’s BMW Art Makers prize, the duo’s project is a powerful musing on memory and the demise of ecosystems. Most of the artworks centre around photographs taken by Peria’s father during a family barge trip down the plane-tree-lined river 32 years ago. In these nostalgic family snapshots taken from the boat, the trees are verdant and blooming – but today it’s a different story. 

“The trees are 200 years old,” Peria says. “But recently they’ve become infected with canker stain, a lethal disease. There were 72,000 of them, and so far, 42,000 have had to be cut down.” Peria, a former engraver, has used engraving tools to etch into the depicted plantlife, creating sculptural furls in place of leaves and bark, while revealing the white photographic paper beneath. The result is a surreal sceneography, part childhood imaginary, part fading memory. As the series progresses, the artist applies larger and larger sections of copper leaf to the photographs, creating a fiery hue that echoes the colour trees turn when affected by canker stain. Infection spreading like wildfire; geography disintegrating like recollections.

Keisha Scarville: Alma at Salle Henri Comte

In the Salle Henri Comte, an intimate space in the city centre, a small but deeply moving series by the American photographer Keisha Scarville reflects on grief and “the materiality of absence”. Made in response to the death of Scarville’s mother, Alma, for whom the series is named, the images draw upon a variety of source material from spirit photography to the ancestral figure of Egungun, and incorporate items of Alma’s clothing and other belongings. These are often donned by Scarville herself, her face never visible, invoking both her mother’s presence and her permanent vanishing from this realm.

Construction Deconstruction Reconstruction at La Mécanique Générale

Clean lines and captivating chiaroscuro abound in an excellent show at La Mécanique Générale, shining a light on Brazilian modernist photography between 1939 and 1964 – a period of rapid growth and cultural transformation in Brazil (concrete and neo-concrete art, Cinema Novo and Bossa Nova all emerged during this time). Most of the works were taken by the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante, an amateur photography club in São Paulo whose innovation put Brazilian photography on the map. Alongside many beguiling architectural shots captured conventionally on film, the group’s experiments with photograms, photomontage and other interventions on reproductions and negatives are also on display, revealing the inventive ways they sought to encapsulate – and emulate – the spirit of a country in transition.

Kikuji Kawada: Endless Map – Invisible at Vague

In 1965, 20 years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese photographer Kikuji Kawada published his now revered photobook The Map, filled with depictions of ruins and abandoned buildings, as well as symbolically charged objects and experimental abstractions that evoke all the terror of war. Now, 60 years on, Endless Map marks Kawada’s first major exhibition in France, bringing together four seminal series from across the nonagenarian’s esteemed career, right up to today: The Map, The Last Cosmology, Los Caprichos and Vortex. Embodying in different ways what the photographer refers to as “the demons lurking in the era”, these haunting impressions, seen collectively, deliver a pertinent meditation on history, trauma and perception that nevertheless remains open to interpretation.

Off Programme Pick: Roots by Cultish Studio at Les Collatéraux

Creative agency Publicis Luxe is back with its third exhibition to coincide with Les Rencontres d’Arles, staged via its cultural platform Cultish Studio with the aim of sparking dialogue between creatives and artists. This year’s edition, Roots, unites creative minds from across the agency with select artists to explore its titular theme through personal memories, inherited stories and imagined pasts. Among our favourite works on display is Longing Il Mare, evocative depictions of Naples captured by the American photographer Brett Lloyd (here in collaboration with Chiara Maurino), with a focus on the sea as a vessel for nostalgia. Absque Originis by French-Haitian dancer, poet and pianist Mackenzy Bergile (in collaboration with Thomas Desoutter) is a stirring choreographic performance, shot on film, that delves into the emotional and psychological toll of hospitalism syndrome – a condition affecting individuals who’ve spent extended periods in institutional or hospital settings, frequently deprived of emotional contact.

Rencontres d’Arles 2025 is on show until 5 October 2025. With special thanks to BMW.

On July 7, the photography world descended once again on the historic city of Arles in the south of France for the 55th edition of its esteemed annual photography festival, Les Rencontres d’Arles. On show until early October, this year’s offering is particularly good, and particularly poignant. Its overarching theme is “disobedient images” – the kinds of pictures that, in an age where mainstream media holds such sway, are needed now more than ever.

Here, we select eight of the festival’s highlights (and our top pick from the coinciding Off programme), spanning a new Nan Goldin slideshow and a poignant exploration of grief by Keisha Scarville through a survey of Brazilian modernist photography and an exquisitely curated show of work by contemporary Australian image-makers.

Nan Goldin: Stendhal Syndrome at Église Saint-Blaise [lead image]

The European debut of a new work by Nan Goldin, this year’s winner of the Kering Women in Motion Award, is well worth the queue. Screened in a tiny, darkened church, Stendhal Syndrome is a 30-minute slideshow that pairs Goldin’s candid photographs of her friends and lovers with those of famous classical, Renaissance and baroque artworks, captured by the American artist during her visits to some of the world’s most famous museums. Goldin provides a voiceover, telling tales from Ovid’s Metamorphosis as the clever combination of images show life mirroring art (or vice versa), recasting the members of Goldin’s inner-circle as mythological beings. So often dubbed “diaristic”, the photographer’s radically raw oeuvre here reveals itself as high art, just as worthy of reverence as that which prompted Stendhal, the French novelist and critic’s famous collapse.

On Country: Photography From Australia at Église Sainte-Anne 

The hot but impressive environs of the Église Sainte-Anne, the church overlooking Arles’ main square, the Place de la République, make an apt setting for a brilliant exhibition of Australian photography. Featuring more than 200 photographic works by 17 artists and collectives, the show considers what it means to be “on Country”, a term embodied by First Peoples in Australia to describe “the lands, waterways, seas and cosmos to which they are connected”.

Highlights include Warakurna Superheroes by Tony Albert and David C Collins, a series of compelling portraits of children from a remote First Nations community. Made in collaboration with the kids themselves, it finds them donning handmade superhero costumes and striking powerful poses against the arid backdrop of their hometown. Indigenous Congolese artist Wani Toaishara’s tender portraits of members of Melbourne’s African diaspora serve to challenge preconceptions about the African experience in Australia. While Lisa Sorgini’s beautiful landscapes are lyrical, quietly unsettling meditations on the climate emergency, imbued with her fears for the future courtesy of the inclusion of her own young children in many of the works. 

Todd Hido: The Light From Within at Espace Van Gogh

In the upper storey of the idyllic Espace Van Gogh, a transportive, typically atmospheric exhibition by the American photographer Todd Hido makes for memorable viewing. Pictures of lonely houses and unpopulated landscapes abound, often captured through the windscreen of the photographer’s car – an effect that lends the scenes the hazy softness of a memory. Melancholic and mystical, these hang alongside collages of vintage family photographs – Hido’s reminder that, in these troubling times, it is more important than ever to “to strengthen the bonds of love with those around us, and find the potential for solace and tenacity in even the most fragile of situations”.

Letizia Battaglia: Always in Search of Life at Chapelle Saint-Martin Du Méjan

The late Sicilian photographer Letizia Battaglia is the focus of an enthralling survey at the Chapelle Saint-Martin Du Méjan, which reveals the full extent of her remarkable talent as a photojournalist and artist. Particularly notable are the photographs she took in 1970s Palermo while working for a local newspaper. At the time, the city was overrun with Mafia-related violence, and Battaglia, with Weegee-like dedication to the cause, brought viewers into the heart of the drama with a cinematographic knack for composition and timing. But she was keen to show other sides of the city too: children playing in the streets, lovers in mourning, religious festivities in action, revealing all the complexities of a place where beauty and bloodshed exist side by side.

Raphaëlle Peria and Fanny Robin: Crossing the Missing Fragment at Cloître Saint-Trophime

In a shady room off the Romanesque Saint-Trophime cloister, visitors are ushered on a dreamlike voyage along the Canal du Midi in the south of France, thanks to the French artist Raphaëlle Peria and curator Fanny Robin. Winners of this year’s BMW Art Makers prize, the duo’s project is a powerful musing on memory and the demise of ecosystems. Most of the artworks centre around photographs taken by Peria’s father during a family barge trip down the plane-tree-lined river 32 years ago. In these nostalgic family snapshots taken from the boat, the trees are verdant and blooming – but today it’s a different story. 

“The trees are 200 years old,” Peria says. “But recently they’ve become infected with canker stain, a lethal disease. There were 72,000 of them, and so far, 42,000 have had to be cut down.” Peria, a former engraver, has used engraving tools to etch into the depicted plantlife, creating sculptural furls in place of leaves and bark, while revealing the white photographic paper beneath. The result is a surreal sceneography, part childhood imaginary, part fading memory. As the series progresses, the artist applies larger and larger sections of copper leaf to the photographs, creating a fiery hue that echoes the colour trees turn when affected by canker stain. Infection spreading like wildfire; geography disintegrating like recollections.

Keisha Scarville: Alma at Salle Henri Comte

In the Salle Henri Comte, an intimate space in the city centre, a small but deeply moving series by the American photographer Keisha Scarville reflects on grief and “the materiality of absence”. Made in response to the death of Scarville’s mother, Alma, for whom the series is named, the images draw upon a variety of source material from spirit photography to the ancestral figure of Egungun, and incorporate items of Alma’s clothing and other belongings. These are often donned by Scarville herself, her face never visible, invoking both her mother’s presence and her permanent vanishing from this realm.

Construction Deconstruction Reconstruction at La Mécanique Générale

Clean lines and captivating chiaroscuro abound in an excellent show at La Mécanique Générale, shining a light on Brazilian modernist photography between 1939 and 1964 – a period of rapid growth and cultural transformation in Brazil (concrete and neo-concrete art, Cinema Novo and Bossa Nova all emerged during this time). Most of the works were taken by the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante, an amateur photography club in São Paulo whose innovation put Brazilian photography on the map. Alongside many beguiling architectural shots captured conventionally on film, the group’s experiments with photograms, photomontage and other interventions on reproductions and negatives are also on display, revealing the inventive ways they sought to encapsulate – and emulate – the spirit of a country in transition.

Kikuji Kawada: Endless Map – Invisible at Vague

In 1965, 20 years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese photographer Kikuji Kawada published his now revered photobook The Map, filled with depictions of ruins and abandoned buildings, as well as symbolically charged objects and experimental abstractions that evoke all the terror of war. Now, 60 years on, Endless Map marks Kawada’s first major exhibition in France, bringing together four seminal series from across the nonagenarian’s esteemed career, right up to today: The Map, The Last Cosmology, Los Caprichos and Vortex. Embodying in different ways what the photographer refers to as “the demons lurking in the era”, these haunting impressions, seen collectively, deliver a pertinent meditation on history, trauma and perception that nevertheless remains open to interpretation.

Off Programme Pick: Roots by Cultish Studio at Les Collatéraux

Creative agency Publicis Luxe is back with its third exhibition to coincide with Les Rencontres d’Arles, staged via its cultural platform Cultish Studio with the aim of sparking dialogue between creatives and artists. This year’s edition, Roots, unites creative minds from across the agency with select artists to explore its titular theme through personal memories, inherited stories and imagined pasts. Among our favourite works on display is Longing Il Mare, evocative depictions of Naples captured by the American photographer Brett Lloyd (here in collaboration with Chiara Maurino), with a focus on the sea as a vessel for nostalgia. Absque Originis by French-Haitian dancer, poet and pianist Mackenzy Bergile (in collaboration with Thomas Desoutter) is a stirring choreographic performance, shot on film, that delves into the emotional and psychological toll of hospitalism syndrome – a condition affecting individuals who’ve spent extended periods in institutional or hospital settings, frequently deprived of emotional contact.

Rencontres d’Arles 2025 is on show until 5 October 2025. With special thanks to BMW.