Highlights from the Rencontres d'Arles
Visible or Invisible
Every summer since 1970, the Rencontres d'Arles has shaken up the way we look at things, moving our attention from one continent to another and reminding us, each time, of our absolute need to exist.
Held annually in the medieval city of Arles, France, the Rencontres d'Arles is the world's leading summer photography festival, and one of the few events anywhere that turns its host city itself into the exhibition. Twelfth-century chapels, Roman ruins, and medieval cloisters become avant-garde gallery space for a few months each year, which is part of why the festival has earned its reputation as something like the Cannes of photography: a launchpad for emerging artists and a meeting point for the wider industry.
But Arles isn't only a showcase for beautiful pictures. From its founding, the festival has operated more like a barometer for the state of the world: a place that takes on minority struggles, historical reinterpretation, and documentary storytelling as seriously as it takes aesthetics. Over five decades, it has repeatedly reshaped itself in response to shifting artistic, political, and social currents, treating exhibition-making almost as a form of research.
- Investment in emerging and unseen artists and curators since 1970
- Programming that surfaces political and social struggles minority narratives
- Hiring Arlesians furthest from the job market for festival roles solidarity model
- Exhibition design built on reuse and circular-economy principles 20+ years
Here are some highlights from this year's edition: a group of photographers whose work, in very different ways, asks who and what gets to be seen.
Mitch Epstein in India, 1978–1989
Mitch Epstein has spent the better part of fifty years photographing the landscape, culture, and psyche of America, work that's earned him the Prix Pictet, the Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a recent induction into the National Academy of Design. His photographs live in major collections, including MoMA and Tate Modern.
Long before most of that, between 1978 and 1989, Epstein made eight trips to India and shot thousands of frames. What resulted is a body of work built on an unusual vantage point: through his Indian family life at the time, Epstein was simultaneously an insider and an outsider, able to move through subcultures that stayed closed to most photographers passing through.
Many of the images on view at the Abbaye de Montmajour are being shown publicly for the first time: remastered prints presented alongside two films Epstein worked on in India with his then-wife, director Mira Nair: India Cabaret (1985) and Salaam Bombay! (1988). Together, the work conjures a moment that feels both distant and immediate. Tangled in the codes of caste, class, and religion, but also simpler, unmediated by the digital layer that sits between us and everything now.
Further reading: Blind Magazine on Epstein in India, and In India at mitchepstein.net.
Cartographies du corps
This collaboration between photographer Susan Meiselas and composer and sound artist Marta Gentilucci maps skin and gesture in aging women's bodies, treating them as records of engaged, energetic lives rather than as symbols of decline. Meiselas and Gentilucci built the piece to push back against the usual visual shorthand for old age (absence, illness, loneliness) and toward something closer to accumulated beauty, the kind that only comes from having lived a long time.
Installed inside the chapel of Saint-Blaise, the piece leans into intimacy: a choral portrait assembled from each woman's individual collaboration with the artists, rather than a single flattening image of "aging."
The camera's own subjectivity
Babette Mangolte moved to New York in the 1970s and spent the decade documenting the city's downtown performing arts scene as both photographer and experimental filmmaker. Working through that period, she developed a way of shooting built around the camera's own subjectivity: the viewer's active role in constructing an image, and the body's relationship to the space around it.
By the 1980s, that instinct had turned into something closer to institutional work: she became a key figure in building an actual archive of performance art, anchoring ephemeral work in a fixed time and place before it could disappear entirely.
Where the disciplines' authority runs out
Julien Lombardi trained as an ethnologist before turning to photography, and that background shows in his method: long, immersive stays in places like Armenia, Mexico, and Egypt precede any formal studio work. Wirikuta grew out of time spent in a desert valley in central Mexico that holds deep significance for the Huichol people: a landscape tied to founding myths and to an annual pilgrimage honoring the birth of the sun and fire.
The territory has drawn outside fascination and myth-making since the Spanish conquest, and Lombardi's installation (photographs, video, and object work combined) sits inside that history without simply repeating it. He borrows the visual language of ethnology, archaeology, and biology mostly so he can test where those disciplines' authority runs out.
Between documentary and the poetic
Seif Kousmate, born in 1988 in Essaouira and based in Morocco, is self-taught, and his work sits in the space between documentary photography and fine-art photography's more poetic register. He spent years working as a project manager in civil engineering before committing to photography full-time in 2016.
Since then, his projects have focused on movement across Africa: migration, and the particular experience of being young on a continent in flux. He co-founded the KOZ collective, a platform built to support and circulate work like his.
Town Boy
Sathish Kumar grew up in Kanchipuram, a small town in South India, and has been photographing since he was sixteen, when an uncle handed him a point-and-shoot film camera. The camera never really left his side after that. School picnics, playgrounds, mountain trips, his own family: Town Boy is what's accumulated from decades of pointing it at ordinary life.
"From my teens to this day, I have been recording the essence of every new experience: roaming around the neighborhood, meeting old friends and making new ones. At some point, like many others, I had to leave my hometown to move to a large city in search of new opportunities. As my life in a large city got suffocating, I began to seek relief by going back to photograph my home town or by going on treks, to take a deep breath."
"Recording this movement of life, connecting back with nature and my roots, has been a way to reconcile with the sudden shift of environment in my life. I believe this world is a series of chain reactions and every piece of life affects another, like the butterfly effect."
Town Boy is, at its core, a book about boyhood: a slow record of one life's drift from a small town toward a cosmopolitan one, told in the ordinary moments most of us don't think to keep.
Taken together, the 2022 program at Arles isn't really organized around a single theme so much as a shared instinct: that the most political thing a photograph can do is simply insist on looking closely. At an aging body, a disappearing hometown, a sacred desert, a subculture that usually goes unphotographed. Visible or invisible turns out to be less a binary than a choice each of these artists makes, frame by frame.
Sources consulted: IRK Magazine, the Rencontres d'Arles on its socially responsible festival model and its history, and Blind Magazine on Mitch Epstein.
"The most political thing a photograph can do is simply insist on looking closely."
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Shravanabelagola, Karnataka, India, 1981.
Courtesy Black River Productions, Ltd. / Galerie Thomas Zander / Mitch Epstein.
