Les Rencontres D’Arles: A Storied French Photo Festival Cements Its Status

Les Rencontres d’Arles photo festival has brought Agnes Varda, Wim Wenders and Saul Leiter to the south of France this summer. Founded in 1970 by the writer Michel Tournier, photographer Lucien Clergue, and art historian Jean-Maurice Rouquette, through a commitment to spotlighting the ultimate in the avant-garde lens, the festival has established itself as a space where household name photographers coalesce with emerging image makers.

“Arles is a key moment for photography, we’ve been building this community since 1970” says the festival’s director Christoph Wiesner — “This year we have the show on Agnes Varda alongside Hannah Darabi’s photo series of the Iranian community in Los Angeles, which is such an important exhibition to have on now within the context of the uprisings in Iran.”

Experiencing Les Rencontres d’Arles involves a lot of walking, with all the exhibitions located in a mix of historic and contemporary locations across the city. This year, everything from the 15th Century Saint-Trophime cloisters to the village Monoprix are home to a wide range of imagery – from documentary photography by Agnes Varda, to portraits by a crop of Scandinavia’s emerging image makers.

Les Rencontres d’Arles is known for showing work that has never been seen in public before, and this year’s reveals include Casa Susanna, an exhibition of photography exploring a flea market discovery of a New York transgender community archive, and a series by Agnes Varda of her years spent in Sete.

For an Arles itinerary, Wiesner recommends seeing a mix of historical and contemporary shows. “The Saul Leiter at the Arles cloisters is essential” he says, “and the Casa Susanna show is very Arles – lifting the lid on a huge and unseen photo archive from the 1960s.” The festival runs until September, and is just the right size to see in a couple of days. Here, Grace Banks rounds up the exhibitions not to miss at Les Rencontres d’Arles.

Agnes Varda at St-Trophime Cloister

Agnes Varda returned to her adoptive town Sete dozens of times until the 1960s, and over the course of her visits took nearly 1000 photos of the port city and its occupants. The resulting contact sheets are on display for the first time at the Arles cloisters, built in the 15th Century. Amongst the images are friends, family and tradespeople, their lives captured by Varda’s lens over twenty years. Taken with her Rolleiflex camera, the Belgium-born photographer casts an empathetic eye on the subjects she engaged with on her regular visits.

Emma Sarpaniemi at L’église Sainte-Anne

The most self referential photography at this year’s festival was that of Finnish Artist Emma Sarpaniemi, whose Self Portrait as Cindy at the contemporary Nordic photography showcase mimics herself in a series of saturated self portraits. Sarpaniemi appears on the poster for Les Rencontres d’Arles 2023, with a portrait of her crouching down looking like Cindy Sherman – a funny, meta nod to the quick and transient photo trends. “I’m interested in the idea of femininity and companionship” she says of the work.

Hannah Darabi at Salle Henri-Comte

Hannah Darabi is an Iranian photographer born and raised in Tehran. In the early noughties she studied at the college of fine arts in Tehran before moving to Paris, France, where she lives now. A large part of Darabi’s process is traveling, and her exhibition at this year’s Arles festival Soleil of Persian Square, spotlights the lives of Iranians living in Los Angeles. The photographer lovingly calls this community Tehrangeles, and this series looks at their cultural identity as they mix Iranian and American influences post the 2022 feminist Iranian uprising.

Eva Nielsen at St-Trophime Cloister

Eva Neilsen was inspired by the “aesthetic of multiples” in the Arles Cloisters and the neighboring countryside of Camargue. To create a “multiplied and tessellate finish” she played with the focus on her photos of her landscape photography of Camargue to mimic the repetitive shapes of the cloisters. “I spent three months shooting Camargue, and I really wanted to link the history of the Arles countryside with the stone cloisters of Arles,” she says of the work.

Casa Susanna at Espace Van Gogh

At a New York flea market in 2004, two friends came across a box of photos. After leafing through them, they discovered that they were of a small and private transgender community who photographed each other in everyday, mundane interior settings in the early 1960s. Casa Susanna at the Espace Van Gogh – above the gardens where Van Gogh used to paint – explores the world of this community. On show are the flea market photos alongside an exploration into mid century transgender American lives.