Rencontres d’Arles 2026
Alice Bouju
Rencontres d’Arles 2026: Photography as a way of seeing the world anew
From July 6 to October 4, 2026, the 57th edition of the Rencontres d’Arles returns to transform the historic city into the world’s largest photography stage. For more than five decades, the festival has championed photography in all its forms. In doing so, it brings together major international artists and emerging voices. As well, it includes historical rediscoveries and ambitious new commissions.
This year’s edition, titled “Worlds in View” (“Des Mondes à Relire”), explores photography’s unique ability to reveal complexity, challenge assumptions and illuminate the connections that shape our lives. Across dozens of exhibitions, visitors are invited to travel through histories, landscapes, memories and imaginations. These stretch far beyond geographical borders.
Courtesy of the artist
A French Photography Festival of Discovery
What makes the Rencontres d’Arles so compelling is its capacity to place established masters alongside lesser-known figures whose work deserves renewed attention. The 2026 programme moves between continents and generations. As a result, it creates unexpected dialogues. These encourage visitors to see photography not as a fixed medium, but as a constantly evolving language.
Themes of memory, identity, social transformation and our relationship with the living world run throughout the festival. This offers multiple entry points for both photography enthusiasts and first-time visitors.
Revisiting Histories
Several exhibitions of the Rencontres d’Arles 2026 focus on artists whose work captures moments of profound cultural change.
One of the festival’s standout exhibitions, “Photoromance” introduces visitors to the work of Ivorian photographer Paul Kodjo through his first major solo exhibition in France. A pioneering figure of post-independence Ivory Coast, Kodjo blended photography, cinema and storytelling to create vivid visual narratives that reflected the optimism and cultural dynamism of the 1970s. His images offer a fascinating glimpse into a society in transformation. At the same time, they showcase a pioneering photographic vision.
Courtesy of Les Rencontres du Sud and in camera galerie.
Meanwhile, “Soul of the City” introduces audiences to the remarkable work of Martine Barrat. Her photographs document communities often overlooked by mainstream narratives. From Harlem and the South Bronx to Paris’s Goutte d’Or district, Martine Barrat’s images are driven by empathy, proximity and a deep commitment to the people she photographs. Her work is less about observation than participation. In doing so, she creates intimate portraits of everyday life and resilience.
Courtesy of the artist and La Galerie Rouge
Landscapes of Memory
The Mediterranean serves as both a place and a metaphor in Anne-Lise Broyer’s haunting exhibition “Mediterranean: Is This Where We Once Lived?”.
Working across sites layered with history, myth and memory, Anne-Lise Broyer creates images that feel suspended between past and present. Rather than documenting specific locations, her photographs evoke moods and sensations, transforming familiar landscapes into spaces of reflection. The result is a poetic journey that invites visitors to slow down and consider the traces left behind by time.
Courtesy of the artist
Photography and the Living World
Questions surrounding ecology, landscape and our relationship with the living world emerge as a recurring thread throughout several exhibitions of this year’s photography festival. This reflects a growing artistic interest in the ways people, places and environments remain deeply interconnected.
In “La terre amoureuse”, Rebekka Deubner explores the landscapes and communities affected by debates surrounding water resources in western France. Through a long-term engagement with farmers, gardeners and environmental activists, she moves beyond headlines and political narratives. Instead, she focuses on daily gestures, shared experiences and the rhythms of life shaped by the land itself.
Her photographs reveal how environmental questions are inseparable from human stories. Additionally, they offer a nuanced perspective on one of the defining issues of our time.
Courtesy of the artist
Images, Technology and Collective Memory
The relationship between memory and image-making takes on a contemporary dimension in Clément Cogitore’s “Memory Palace” at the Rencontres d’Arles 2026 edition.
Combining archival footage, personal narratives and generative artificial intelligence, the artist explores what societies choose to remember and what risks being forgotten. Drawing from hundreds of hours of historical material, the project creates a fascinating reflection. It focuses on the ways images shape collective memory in an age increasingly defined by digital technologies.
Rather than offering straightforward answers, the photographs encourages visitors to question the reliability, fragility and emotional power of visual archives.
Courtesy of the artist, Walter Films and ADAGP, Paris
Icons Through New Eyes
One of the festival’s most anticipated highlights is “Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm”. This features more than 250 photographs taken by Paul McCartney during the meteoric rise of The Beatles.
Far from the polished imagery that would later define Beatlemania, these photographs provide a personal perspective on an extraordinary cultural moment. They are captured from within the whirlwind of fame itself. These images reveal both the excitement and the intensity of a period. This period transformed popular culture forever.
Courtesy of the artist, under exclusive license to MPL Archive LLP
Celebrating Everyday Lives
The work of Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen offers another kind of journey. Presented in “Echoes of the Ordinary”, her photographs focus on the lives of ordinary people navigating extraordinary historical circumstances.
Over decades of travel and engagement, Bertien van Manen developed an approach grounded in trust and human connection. Her images feel intimate without being intrusive. As a result, they reveal the quiet dignity, humour and resilience of individuals often absent from official histories.
Courtesy of Stichting Bertien van Manen
Rencontres d’Arles 2026: a World in Motion
More than a photography festival, the Rencontres d’Arles is a place where stories, cultures and perspectives intersect. The 2026 edition embraces complexity and curiosity. In other words, it encourages visitors to move between personal narratives and global histories, between documentary realities and poetic interpretations.
Whether discovering forgotten archives, engaging with contemporary debates or encountering new artistic voices, visitors will find a programme that demonstrates photography’s enduring ability to expand the way we see the world, and ourselves.
Courtesy of the artist, under exclusive license to MPL Archive LLP
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Alice is a Paris based photograper with a passion for fashion. Based in Paris, she develops an approach that brings together photography and writing, often mixing the two within her projects.
Her work is deeply rooted in reality. She is particularly drawn to documentary practices, using images and text as complementary tools to observe, question, and reinterpret the world around her. Whether through visual series or written pieces, she seeks to capture fragments of the everyday and give them a new narrative dimension.
She has developed a strong interest in research and editorial work. Writing articles, exploring contexts, and building stories from real-life subjects naturally extend her creative process. This intersection between documentation and storytelling reflects a field she has long been eager to explore.
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