Arles, in France’s Camargue region, has been swelling in reputation since Maja Hoffmann’s art campus—featuring a jagged Frank Gehry-designed tower clad in shimmering stainless steel panels—rose over the horizon line. The city has a much longer artistic heritage than that, with Arles Amphitheatre (completed in 90 AD) among the UNESCO World Heritage Site-listed attractions. The Rencontres d’Arles photography festival first brought art fervor to the city over 50 years ago, presenting a global array of photographic practices every summer into early fall since its foundation in 1970. This year, through October 4, some 40 exhibitions are on in venues as diverse as 19th-century industrial buildings and the upper floor of Monoprix (loosely the French version of Target). This array takes the temperature of contemporary photography thematically, formally and politically.
Three exhibitions stand out. At Palais de L’archevêché, “Ghana! Dreaming Independence 1957-1976” examines how the country championed optimism after more than a century under British colonial rule. Beyond reframing its infrastructure, it forged a new liberated cultural identity through the visual arts, flourishing from brochures to postcards to stamps to textiles. These helped dismantle colonial-era racist imagery across photography books and print culture, notably in such tomes as Ghana: An African Portrait (1976) by Paul Strand or The Roadmakers (1961) by American photographer Willis E. Bell and Ghanaian playwright Efua Sutherland. The former, taken with a view camera in the 1960s, focuses on traditional signifiers (which were later printed widely on banknotes); the latter’s well-designed layout and photojournalist style, captured with a medium-format camera, ushered in modern representation. Outside of such publications, the featured mid-20th-century portraits by James Barnor are especially beautiful, while Carlos Idun Tawiah’s contemporary scenes in Accra showcase the ongoing legacy and vibrancy of Ghana’s denizens.
At Espace Van Gogh, Martine Barrat’s body of work centers on late 20th-century New York City’s disenfranchised and underserved neighborhoods. French-born Barrat became an integral part of the communities she photographed, uplifting local lives with respect and love. Though a foreigner, Barrat was readily integrated as an insider—for example, she photographed a couple’s wedding after meeting them while stalled in the subway. She moved to New York in 1968 with the intention of kickstarting a career as a dancer, but was deterred by an accident and acquired a camera instead. In the 1970s, her documentary project on South Bronx gangs, You Do the Crime, You Do the Time, screened at the Whitney Museum. To her, the South Bronx was “the anti-West Side Story.” From the 1980s onward, she spotlit friends and residents of Harlem, often those tied to the Rhythm Club on 132nd Street. In Paris, she applied the same warmth to the neighborhood of La Goutte d’Or, which even to this day is sidelined as unsafe and poor. Her photographs of the youth especially reflect a tenderness that transcends socioeconomic circumstances.
At Chapelle Saint-Martin Du Méjan, Harry Gruyaert’s international cityscapes are less about place than about palette. Encapsulating more than 50 years of meandering the globe, the unilateral vibrancy of color crosses over with what curator Géraldine Lay described as “urban geometries.” His compositions—shaped by architecture, typography and human silhouettes—turn the anonymity of the streets and commercial hubs into something magical. He picks up synchronizations of color as though there’s a secret harmony humming below the cosmopolitan chaos: like the unison of a green suede coat and the green stems of a bouquet of flowers (Belgium) or a woman talking on the phone juxtaposed next to a TV on which Jerry Seinfeld is talking into a mic (Spain) or the flashy, shiny red hood of a car matching the awning of a café tabac (France).
Beyond the Rencontres, LUMA Arles is showing an assortment of exhibitions, arguably the most interesting of which features chimeral drawings by Zaha Hadid, showcasing “the sensation of motion and kinetic distortion.” Titled “I Think There Should Be No End to Experimentation” to aptly reflect her radical and compelling ethos of 21st-century urbanism, it is part of the museum’s ongoing Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives series (it runs through March 31, 2027). Later the first woman to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004, in the 1970s as a student she understood “Suprematist painting not as a flat graphic design but as a map for ‘anti-gravitational reorganization,’” which would play out later in her career as a “direct, transhistorical dialogue between the Russian avant-garde and her own contemporary architectural practice.”
Her acrylic on cartridge paper drawing The Peak, Overall Isometric Day View (1982-3) ushered her into prominent view with a fascinating Hong Kong leisure club proposal that intermingled rocky landscape with urban glamor through horizontal skyscrapers (never made, ultimately, for financial reasons). For an exhibition at the Guggenheim a decade later, Hadid was able to “conceptualize weightlessness, fragmentation and fluidity before translating those 2D concepts into the 3D reality.” The fact that this exhibition is hosted in Gehry’s building is all the more touching, since they were friends.
Elsewhere, Lee Ufan Arles showcases a beautifully moody array of work by Korean director Park Chan-wook (on view through October 4). Known for his trilogy Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Old Boy (2003) and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005), amongst other cinematic greats, this show debuts Chan-wook’s trove of still images in Europe—and comes off the heels of his presiding over the 2026 Festival de Cannes jury. During the opening, Chan-wook expressed via translator that he enjoyed relinquishing the control he had to impose on a cinema set, instead gravitating towards existing natural light and happenstance over scenography.
He is attracted to people-less landscapes, but not only. There’s a fish market in which the tentacles of octopi in a slimy pile seem as though fighting each other; a tree (the kind found planted in old Buddhist temples) with shredded bark that looks like a sinewy bone from a skeleton, or the light in Busan hitting a draped cactus by a seaside-facing window.
His clever eye hones in on the way shapes stand in for other familiar forms. Most images were photographed in Korea, but exceptions include an uprooted dead tree lakeside in California he spotted while filming his series “The Sympathizer,” a California barbecue placed in a mosaic circle that reminded him of a UFO, and folded parasols that evoke a ghostly ensemble at La Mamounia hotel in Morocco.
The new kid on the block, institutionally speaking, is Fonds Bustamante: the namesake space of French artist Jean-Marc Bustamante, who represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2003 and directed the prestigious École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris (2015-2018). Housed in a desacralized 12th-century church—formerly also a furniture boutique and events space before falling into ruin—the niche with Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle is still there, a remaining emblem to welcome pilgrims. The building has been renovated and restructured over three floors by architect/designer Charles Zana, applying a minimalist touch. Bustamante himself intervened on the facade (a mix of new and old stones) with yellow tiles made from enameled lava.
The first exhibition, “En Miroirs,” on view through October 31, mixes Bustamante’s own work with work by artists of all ages—including former students from the Beaux-Arts. He thought about how to “bring something new to the pre-existing offer in Arles,” deciding to focus on, as he said, “my career, my affinities with artists with whom I was linked and worked with, who punctuated 40-50 years of my life as an artist.” He describes the exhibition as an “intimate promenade” through works he finds “essential—not just because they’re good, from my point of view, but also because they reflect the global nature of the cultural offer today.” The opening piece is by Reinhard Mucha, a vitrine and stacked chairs that cheekily play with museum accoutrement in wood, steel and glass (OT Oberer Totpunkt, 1982-85), as well as a recent ensemble of neon-hued pigments on canvas by Gerhard Merz (PSSST GOD, 2026), plus an untitled triptych acrylic on canvas from 2010 by Anne-Marie Schneider. Upstairs there are sculptures (and custom-made seating) by Franz West, as well as a watercolor and a ceramic piece by Thomas Schütte, amongst other works.
While Arles tends to be buzziest in July and August, the fall season is a quieter, crowd-free time to explore a town packing great artistic punch.