Les Rencontres d'Arles 2026 Opens This Week With a Programme That Asks Us to Look Again

The world's oldest and most prestigious photography festival opens its doors in Arles, southern France, on Monday 6 July 2026. The 57th edition of Les Rencontres d'Arles runs through 4 October, transforming the city's Roman chapels, twelfth-century cloisters, and nineteenth-century industrial buildings into venues for over forty contemporary photography exhibitions. Opening Week, the festival's most concentrated and internationally attended moment, runs from 6 to 12 July.

This year's theme is Des mondes à relire, translated as Worlds to Reread. Festival director Christoph Wiesner described the intention behind it directly: "In a period where everything seems to push us to simplify, to oppose, to reduce, we wanted these 57th Rencontres d'Arles to create, on the contrary, a space to welcome complexity and sensitivity. Not to artificially soften the violence of the real, but to restore its full depth. To look at this sometimes frightening world without ceasing to look for forms of beauty, relationship, and freedom within it."

The programme gives significant space to the African continent, with an opening chapter titled Independances that includes Ghana! Dreaming of Independence, tracing how photography shaped Ghanaian national identity after independence, and Photoromance, the first major solo exhibition in France for Ivorian photographer Paul Kodjo, who founded the avant-garde agency MAMEDIS and was among the first African photographers to work with the photo-novel format. Sammy Baloji's Impala places his own family history alongside the history of his native Congo.

Among the major retrospectives, William Klein's American photography is shown at the Museon Arlaten. Clément Cogitore's Memory Palace, which combines archival footage with generative artificial intelligence to explore how societies decide what to remember, is among the more formally ambitious commissions of the edition. One of the most anticipated events of Opening Week is a book signing by Patti Smith for her new release Bread of Angels at LUMA Arles on 5 July.

The Arles Books Fair, now in its fifth edition, runs from 7 to 11 July at the École nationale supérieure de la photographie, bringing together over eighty international independent publishing houses with daily signing sessions from 5:30pm.

The all-exhibitions pass is €42, reduced to €33. Day passes are €35. Entry is free for under-18s and Arles residents. Tickets are available at rencontres-arles.com.