ARLES, France — When the 57th Rencontres d’Arles photography festival opened in the second week of July, its 47 exhibitions spread contemporary photography across Arles’s ancient churches, modern galleries, and unusual venues, with almost no air conditioning to be found. Visitors, sweating but cheerful, wandered through Roman and medieval buildings and along busy streets lined with Parisian-priced cafés, carrying personal Evian misters and plastic spinning fans, which have become new summer essentials in Europe amid the climate crisis.
Opening week brought 22,000 people to the city — nearly half the population of Arles, the small French town on the Rhône that was once home to Vincent Van Gogh. Even so, the atmosphere remained intimate, with everyone seeming to know everyone else, or at least know of them. The festival continues through October 4, and a season pass is priced at €42 euros.
During the first week, more than 115 public events unfolded, including artist panels, curator tours, book signings at the Arles Books Fair, open-air screenings by the documentary platform Tënk, and sponsored parties that lasted into the early morning hours. Most of these events were free. A handful of unofficial, art-world side gatherings required an invitation, while others simply depended on knowing where to go.
“It doesn’t have as much pretension as a lot of the other [art] events — although people who have been coming longer would probably push back on that,” said Perry Shimon, a contributing editor at Autre and curator of Filoxenia: Queer Joy in the Mediterranean, a film and photographic project on view at the festival.
In the catalog, director Christoph Wiesner wrote that “as everything pushes toward simplification, division and reduction,” the 57th edition of Rencontres d’Arles would offer a setting for “complexity and attentiveness.” This year, that central space is devoted to those long pushed to the margins by the Western canon, though the festival itself does not use that language.
