Les Rencontres d’Arles, the world’s leading multi-venue photography festival, returns this summer for its 56th edition.
The theme of this year’s festival is “Disobedient Images,” reflecting photography’s power as a form of resistance, testimony, and cultural exchange. The 2025 edition casts a spotlight on Brazil and Australia, alongside exhibitions that span generations, geographies, and perspectives.
The festival is organized into six thematic chapters. In Counter-Voices, the group exhibition Ancestral Futures presents reinterpretations of archival material to question colonial legacies and the struggles of Afro-Brazilian, Indigenous, and LGBTQIA+ communities, while On Country explores the deep spiritual and environmental ties of Australian Aboriginal communities to their land.
A major highlight is this year’s Women in Motion award recipient, Nan Goldin, with Stendhal Syndrome, a deeply personal multimedia slideshow juxtaposing two decades of photographs taken in museums around the world with intimate portraits of friends and lovers. Structured around The Metamorphoses, a Latin narrative poem written in 8 CE by the Roman poet Ovid, the work casts the American photographer’s subjects as mythological figures—Orpheus, Galatea, Hermaphrodite—set against a score by Soundwalk Collective and Mica Levi.
Through this mythic lens, Goldin asserts the dignity and legacy of her chosen community, culminating in a retelling of the emotional collapse caused by overwhelming beauty, known as the “Stendhal syndrome.”
The exhibition is part of the Families Stories chapter, which comprises seven different exhibitions by eight female artists, including Diana Markosian with her acclaimed project Father, a deeply compelling, personal exploration of estrangement and reconnection.
Other notable solo exhibitions include Letizia Battaglia: Always in Search of Life, which spotlights the Italian photographer’s fearless documentation of Mafia violence in Sicily, along with her deeply humanist portraits of Palermo’s inhabitants. Kikuji Kawada: The Map / Visions of the Invisible highlights the Japanese photographer’s landmark series The Map and The Last Cosmology, meditations on memory, history, and national trauma through a distinctly poetic and experimental visual language.
Nomadic Chronicles is a key thematic section of Les Rencontres d’Arles 2025, bringing together a diverse group of photographers whose works investigate notions of territory and movement.. From Anna Fox and Karen Knorr’s reimagining of Berenice Abbott’s unfinished journey along U.S. Route 1, to Todd Hido’s moody portrayals of anonymous American suburbs in The Light from Within, the section reflects on the physical and emotional geographies we inhabit.
Kourtney Roy’s The Tourist uses humor and stylized self-portraiture to critique clichés of travel and femininity, while Patrick Wack’s Azov Horizons offers a haunting glimpse into the conflict-scarred regions around the Sea of Azov. Personal histories and inner landscapes emerge in Jean-Michel André’s Room 207 and Carine Krecké’s Losing North, while Raphaëlle Peria and Fanny Robin—recipients of the 2025 BMW Art Makers award—trace a childhood memory along the Canal du Midi in Crossing the Missing Fragment. Finally, Laurence Kubski’s Sauvages [Wild] interrogates the boundaries between nature and civilization. Together, these exhibitions form a powerful meditation on dislocation, belonging, and the evolving meanings of place
As always, Les Rencontres d’Arles features a dyanmic satellite program including Arles Books Fair, portfolio reviews, screenings, and public talks. The full exhibition program runs from July 7 to October 5, 2025, continuing the festival’s role as a global forum for photography that reflects, questions, and reimagines our world.
The 56th Rencontres d’Arles runs from July 7 – October 5, 2025
For more information and to purchase tickets, visit their website.
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