In Arles, the Rencontres de la Photographie Showcases the Vernacular, the Archive and the Contemporary

The Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles has been an annual magnet during the summer season for professionals and amateurs alike since it began in 1970 in the south of France. The small city—which has become both more international and more gentrified since a towering Frank Gehry-designed arts center opened in 2021—mounts diverse exhibitions in churches, former middle schools, cloisters, museums, a crypt and even a Monoprix (the French equivalent of Target). The 2025 edition, which runs through October 5, is umbrellaed by the theme “Disobedient Images,” a kind of counterpoint to the existing status quo.

In a reframing of national narrative, “On Country: Photography from Australia” is a group show of artists exploring their country’s identity, subtly or explicitly addressing its heritage of colonialism over First Nations people. Per the wall text, “on Country” indicates “more than just being situated somewhere, it is about being shaped by that place, connected to it, and having a responsibility to care for it.” wani toaishara lovingly portrays Black citizens from the African diaspora in Melbourne while Adam Ferguson sensitively showcases varied populations, from coal miners to contract shearers, based on his 150,000 kilometers of travel across the country. The images by Indigenous photographer Michael Cook are jarring and provocative, replicating a single figure in politically symbolic spaces to underline minority discrimination and lack of visibility.

A very different group show, “In Praise Of Anonymous Photography,” is a fascinating repository of vintage vernacular images divorced from their once-owners. They all come from the collection of Marion and Philippe Jacquier, who were gallerists for over twenty years outside of Paris and self-describe as being “in the business of ‘image hunting.’” They specialize in uncovering amateur photography ranging from pinup girls to animal bestiaries and own a compendium of 10,000 silver prints. Here, the selected images and series are especially enigmatic and often eccentric. One woman (“Lucette”) had 850 photos taken of her during her travels—never backgrounded by anything remarkable, often blurry—between 1954 and 1977. Who she is, the purpose of her documentation, and who took the photos is unknown. In another series, a pharmacist circa the 1950s used a spy camera to photograph his day-to-day customers unbeknownst to them, using a trigger system activated behind the cash register. Though the photos are pedestrian and innocent-seeming, the ethics behind this endeavor are suspect. In another series, a 20-year-old man returns to places he spent time in with a lover before she moved to Tahiti, photographing urban geography and chronicling what happened there (crying, kissing, etc.). Is he a sweet romantic or a creepy obsessive?

Also archival but less inscrutable, “The World of Louis Stettner (1922–2016)” presents the photographer as bridging American street photography and French humanist photography. Born in Brooklyn in 1922, Stettner trained at the Photo League, which he described as “the first progressive, left-wing photography organization in the United States.” His 1946 series on the New York subway captured with his Rolleiflex is fascinating, and the MTA sure looked better then: men in hats and women in fur coats sitting primly between Coney Island and Times Square. His series Nancy is a study of an insouciant adolescent living in Greenwich Village, her life characterized by “sleeping late, odd jobs, money scrounging and partying.” She’s photographed playfully upturning a glass in her mouth or lounging in bed with a radio. Stettner also mixed with French photographers (Willy Ronis, Édouard Boubat, Brassaï); he himself settled in Paris in the middle of the 20th Century for several years, and again late in life.

Featuring another man who moved to France, the “Yves Saint Laurent and Photography” show is a splashy one. Saint Laurent himself was almost relentlessly photographed, snapped by Irving Penn, David Bailey, Robert Doisneau and—in a then-scandalous nude portrait from 1971—Jeanloup Sieff, amongst many others. These photographs unquestionably contributed to Yves Saint Laurent’s renown. Some 80 works trace the evolution of Saint Laurent’s creations in the media (like Richard Avedon’s Dovima with Elephants featuring a F/W 1955 Yves Saint Laurent for Christian Dior dress or Jean-Claude Sauer’s images of bright Pop Art cocktail dresses from the haute couture F/W 1966 collection) as well as iconic portraits of the couturier himself (the show opens with a wallpaper reproduction of Helmut Newton black-and-white 1971 contact sheets and ends with a photo from 2000 by Juergen Teller). Nestled within this exhibition is a panorama of 200 archival items from the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris, including passports, paper dolls, scrapbooks of fashion shows, advertising for the opening of the ready-to-wear boutique, covers of Paris Match from when YSL stepped down as a designer and a 42-page special from when he died in 2008. The paraphernalia provides a dense and completist look of someone who was fully documenting his life as it unfolded and had a public-facing persona as much as his collections did.

Focusing on a different veteran icon, Nan Goldin presents a contemporary work at Église Saint-Blaise: showings of “Stendhal Syndrome” (2024) loop on the half hour, with limited seating. The Goldin-narrated photo slideshow has a soundtrack composed by Soundwalk Collective, and the film juxtaposes cropped snapshots of classical, renaissance and baroque masterpieces taken within the collections of international museums (the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Galleria Borghese, the National Gallery), interspersed with Goldin’s portfolio of intimate portraits. Stendhal syndrome is a kind of aesthetic affliction named after the 19th-century French author who felt weak in the face of overwhelming beauty. Goldin’s “Stendhal Syndrome” creates parallels between centuries-old gestures and contemporary poses, instilling a meaningful sense of both artistic continuity and sensitive humanism.

Nan Goldin was the guest artistic director of the Rencontres in 2009, and at the time introduced an exhibition featuring work by David Armstrong. Fifteen years later, the two are part of the same festival again: David Armstrong’s photos are on view at LUMA Arles, curated by Mathieu Humery (who also curated the Diane Arbus show last year, which is now in New York until August 17). In the 1970s, Armstrong studied photography and eventually became associated with a larger group of avant-garde artists known as the Boston School. An exquisite portraitist, Armstrong (who died in 2014) captured striking moments amongst his coterie of queer misfits—messy hair, direct gazes and fabulous outfits.

For a more contemporary take on queer culture, Lila Neutre’s work is a tribute to LGBTQIA+ nightlife. “Dancing on Ashes (Open Fire)” juxtaposes two series of photographs completed about ten years apart: Twerk Nation and The Rest is Drag, a vision of parties and performance through queer community, including the collective La Famille Maraboutage in Marseille and their quest for inclusivity. These figures affirmingly shrug off social normativity in patent leather red heels, silver lipstick and sparkly accessories, although the disco ball hanging in the exhibition is on the nose.

One approach that consistently did not deliver across three exhibitions was the “reinvention” of archival material through modern interpretations. The archives remain superior. One such example was Agnès Geoffray’s “They Stray, They Persist, They Thunder.” Geoffray’s portraits of young women are based on research pertaining to underage girls in France imprisoned between the end of the 19th Century and the middle of the 20th Century for deviating from gender norms. Geoffray’s work is shown alongside a selection of historical documents—photographs, articles, administrative paperwork—which are layered in an alarm-red coating. The records themselves are fascinating, but the contemporary portraits feel hollow relative to the originals.

Similarly, a contemporary series on U.S. Route 1 by Anna Fox and Karen Knorr reprises a journey undertaken by Berenice Abbott between July and September 1954; Abbott drove and documented her journey back and forth from Fort Kent, Maine, to the Florida Keys. Route 1 offered, according to Abbott, “a realistic picture of a true cross-section of American life.” Her experiences—never published—reflected the increasing standardization of the mid-century American landscape. In turn, Anna Fox and Karen Knorr photographed small towns, motels and diners along the same route, timed to Trump’s first presidential campaign and the country’s fast-rising zeal for conservative politics. Their images portray an America that is vulgar, ramshackle and stagnant. Unlike the images by Abbott, they feel cliché; there’s déjà vu. Lastly, Carmen Winant’s exploration of the lesbian separatist communities of the 1970s connected her with Carol Newhouse, co-founder of WomanShare, a lesbian feminist community on the West Coast. Winant and Newhouse pursued several collaborative projects, including new work on view here: shooting jointly on the same roll of film sent back and forth, doubly exposing and layering images. The result—deemed, in the wall text, a reclamation of feminist photographic strategies—is not nearly as powerful as the black-and-white photos from the 1970s by Newhouse, which reveal a sense of solidarity and camaraderie.