What to See in Arles this Summer

The world’s most prestigious and longest-running photography festival returns to Arles for its 57th edition, taking over churches, museums and converted railway works to present work old and new along the theme of ‘Worlds In View’. Our editors and contributors bring you the highlights from the South of France.

Rinko Kawauchi,Tokuko Ushioda: From Our Windows
Vague

Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled, series As it is, 2020.

The history of postwar Japanese photography is often narrated through the radical aesthetics of the Provoke movement and the male-dominated canon that followed, from Daidō Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira to Nobuyoshi Araki. That history has frequently privileged the street over the home, confrontation over observation and, in Araki's case, a highly gendered eroticism that has done much to shape international perceptions of Japanese photography.

From Our Windows, on show at Vague, traces a quieter but no less significant lineage. Bringing together Tokuko Ushioda (born 1940) and Rinko Kawauchi (born 1972), the exhibition pairs two generations of wo. men photographers whose work largely developed outside that dominant narrative. Both make the home their primary subject, but from different generations and historical vantage points. Ushioda's photographs of family life, work and the changing home reflect the social transformations of Japan's post-war reconstruction and rapid economic growth, while Kawauchi's meditations on everyday rituals, motherhood, ageing and mortality emerge from a later society shaped by globalisation.

The intimacy on show here should not be mistaken for retreat. Instead, their photographs chart the evolution of modern Japan through the private spaces in which its wider economic, cultural and technological shifts were lived and experienced. Long overshadowed by the fascination with Japan's postwar avant-garde, their work reveals a parallel tradition in which the home proved as revealing as the street in documenting the country's transformation. First presented at Kyotographie International Photography Festival 2024, the pairing also anticipates The Photographers' Gallery's current survey of Japanese women photographers, suggesting that the canon of postwar Japanese photography is still in the process of being understood.
Tom Seymour

Meghann Riepenhoff: Upwelling
Cloître Saint-Trophime

Meghann Riepenhoff, Adaptive Radiation #1 (Hanford Reach, Washington, USA, 5.23.2025, River Water, Reference Woman, Reducing Agent), May 23, 2025, series State Shift, 2024–2026, unique dynamic cyanotype.

Trained as a photographer but working largely without one, Meghann Riepenhoff’s cyanotypes are created in collaboration with the elements, allowing water, wind, sediment and light to act as co-authors. Upwelling, installed in the twelfth-century Cloître Saint-Trophime, a former monastic cloister attached to the now deconsecrated church, marks the latest evolution of this approach to photography.

It builds on her breakthrough Littoral Drift series, created on the shorelines of California and the Pacific Northwest, where light-sensitive paper was submerged in the surf and exposed to tides and waves. By contrast, Upwelling draws together works made across rivers, lakes, coastlines and glacial environments in the American West and from artist excursions to Iceland.

Set against the permanence of Arles' Roman architecture, these chemically unstable cyanotypes continue to evolve after their creation, transforming photography from a medium of representation into an organic process of change. Like Lisa Oppenheim and Lara Tabet elsewhere in this year's Rencontres, Riepenhoff treats photography as a living medium rather than a fixed record of history or a comment on the nature of memory. Together, these works argue that photographs are not simply taken from nature – they are authored by it.
Tom Seymour

Park Chan-wook: On a Quiet Morning
Lee Ufan Arles

Park Chan-wook, Faces 13, 2013.

Few contemporary filmmakers have cultivated a visual language as immediately recognisable as Park Chan-wook's. Originally trained in philosophy and having planned to be a painter, the Korean director of Oldboy (2003), The Handmaiden (2016) and Decision to Leave (2022) has since developed a form of cinema that combines Korean cultural sensibilities with European classical music, Gothic melodrama, Greek tragedy and the narrative precision of Hollywood thrillers.

Less well known is that, throughout his filmmaking career, he has sustained an equally rigorous photographic practice, producing these images alongside decades of cinema. On a Quiet Morning reveals that these disciplines have developed in parallel rather than in sequence. And if cinema allows Park to minutely choreograph every gesture within a highly stylised visual language, photography becomes the medium through which he discovers compositions already latent in the world. Visual coincidences, encounters and scenes acquire an uncanny quality through the precision of his eye rather than the invention of narrative. His sustained fascination with the ordinary recalls the influence of William Eggleston, whom he met while filming Stoker (2013) in Nashville, and whose ability to locate the extraordinary within everyday life reinforced Park's instincts.

Presented at Lee Ufan Arles, the foundation set up three years ago by the eponymous Korean artist, the exhibition invites comparison with Ufan’s patient, repetitive painting practice. Park's photographs operate in a similar register. In contrast to the violence and narrative tension that define much of his cinema, they reveal the visual intelligence that has always underpinned it, suggesting that the meticulously composed worlds of his films begin not on the set, but in the simple discipline of looking at the world around him.
Tom Seymour

Charlotte Gainsbourg: 5 Bis
La Galerie du Cloître 

Photo by Charlotte Gainsbourg.

‘Alone here. No one’s around. I take my time.’ 

The actress and sometime singer and artist presents glimpses of 5 bis rue de Verneuil in Paris, the former home of her father, legendary musician and pop provocateur, Serge Gainsbourg. His daughter’s relationship with the house is multifaceted. She has preserved it, opened it to the public and created a soundtrack (with Soundwalk Collective, whose collaboration with Patti Smith can be seen elsewhere at the festival) to accompany visitors in their navigation of the dark, black felt-walled building, containing such treasures as the original manuscript of la Marseillaise (the French national anthem) and Salvador Dali’s La Chasse aux Papillons (1930). 

These images present a different side to the father-daughter relationship, immortalised in infamous moments like 12-year-old Charlotte’s appearance on Lemon Incest (1984). Taken thirty years after Serge Gainsbourg’s death, and before the house opens to the public for the day, they perform a kind of intimacy: a rare glimpse of the identity and memory of such a mythologised and public figure.
Ella Slater

Ming Smith: Wandering Light
Église Sainte-Anne Sainte-Anne

Ming Smith, Flamingo Fandango (Painted), 1988.

The Detroit-born, Harlem-based photographer Ming Smith was the first woman to join 1960s collective The Kamoinge Workshop, a formative group of African-American photographers pursuing self-determination through both politics and art. In the decades following, she would become renowned for her luminous and hazy depictions of Blackness: shadowy metaphors for the struggle towards Black visibility in twentieth-century USA and the mutability of identity. 

Smith would also photograph such cultural figures as Nina Simone, Grace Jones and Alice Coltrane, and would later become the first Black female photographer to be included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Despite this, widespread and international recognition of her work was a fairly recent phenomenon, following inclusion in major exhibitions like the Tate Modern’s 2017 show, Soul of a Nation, and the Brooklyn Museum’s, We Wanted a Revolution, of the same year. 

In Arles, Wandering Light spans several decades of the photographer’s practice, situating Smith not only as a North American photographer but as one closely in dialogue with Europe’s art histories. 
Ella Slater

Martine Barrat: Soul of the City
Espace Van Gogh

Martine Barrat, Mamadou picked out his armchair on Polonceau Street, La Goutte d’Or, 1982. Courtesy: La Galerie Rouge.

Martine Barrat was a jack of all trades in every sense of the word. Beginning her career as a dancer in Paris, she moved to New York just after the tumultuous events of May 1968, where she performed in La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. Following a career-ending injury, she became involved in documentary work, culminating in the 1978 film, You Do the Crime, You Do the Time, featuring various South Bronx gangs. 

The act of documenting a community as an outsider has at times been perceived as exploitative, yet, at its core, Barrat’s work is characterised by empathy. Capturing night out rituals, block parties, domino champions and boxing rings, Barrat’s work is an expansive ode to a community on the margins and what it means to belong.
Katherine Elliott

Phan Quang: Re/cover
Espace Monoprix 

Phan Quang, Re/cover No. 12, Seoul, Korea, 2014, series Re/cover, 2013–2016. Courtesy: Galerie Bao.

Vietnamese photographer Phan Quang’s Re/cover (2013–16) is a monument to how we process collective memory.

Quang, who is nominated for the festival's Discovery Prize, uses the motif of a white veil throughout the series: half wedding-day garb, half funereal shroud. Each photograph is staged in the subject’s domestic space, evoking aristocratic portraiture or family photographs posted to Facebook feeds, whereas works like Re/cover No. 12, featuring a commemorative statue, place these visuals firmly in the public sphere. 

In this series, Quang explores a little-known part of Vietnam’s history: the fate of women who had children with Japanese soldiers who remained in Vietnam after World War II. Such unions were often stigmatised, swept under the rug of national storytelling. By memorialising these communities in the banality of the everyday, Quang’s work questions who we choose to remember. Ultimately, he chooses to elevate ordinary citizens, those neglected in the annals of history.
Katherine Elliott

Lisa Oppenheim: Monsieur Steichen
La Mécanique Générale

Lisa Oppenheim, Steichen Study 59, 2025. Courtesy: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles.

There is surprisingly little mention of artificial intelligence at this year’s Rencontres, but perhaps that’s wise given its impact on photography is often overblown. Away from the AI schlock that we are already bored with, some artists are harnessing the technology with a more critical eye, using it not so much to make images, but to examine how we might imagine something that never existed.

New York-based artist Lisa Oppenheim is a prime example, resurrecting an extinct iris once cultivated by Edward Steichen (1879-1973), the artist and curator who was one of the most significant figures in the history of photography. She uses AI to imagine what was never photographed before, materialising synthetic images through labour-intensive dye-transfer prints – a process once used by Steichen himself.

The result is both archival and imaginary – a ghostly hybrid of analogue and artificial reproduction.
Simon Bainbridge