Artificial intelligence aside, the archive – and specifically how to decolonise and disseminate it – is perhaps the most burning photography issue of the day. Les Rencontres d’Arles has taken note: this year it focuses on the idea of the archive from within the African continent and throughout the Mediterranean. It asks us to question photographic authority and to complicate the identities and histories that images attempt to represent.
This, the 57th edition, champions those image-makers and establishments digitising and opening up their collections, with memory, family history and lost photobooks increasingly serving as ‘research objects’. Vernacular photography has become highly valued as a new generation bypasses formal institutions. ‘In a world racing towards simplification, division and reduction,’ says Christoph Wiesner, the festival director, ‘we wanted to create space for complexity and attentiveness – to face reality without flinching, while continuing to find beauty, connection and freedom within it.’
While images by Seydou Keïta and James Barnor are familiar from exhibitions such as Moma’s recent Ideas of Africa, there is archival work here by photographers with whom many visitors won’t be so well acquainted. Paul Kodjo, for example, is a key figure in post-independence Ivory Coast and yet he is only now receiving his first major solo exhibition in France. His photographs have that romantic, celebratory tone reminiscent of Malick Sidibé’s dancing couples from Bamako, Mali, though they sit just outside of the canon.
Meanwhile, the exhibition Ghana! Dreaming of Independence revisits the visual culture that emerged there in the decades after secession, when photography and print media helped shape new national imaginaries. It draws on key photobooks such as Ghana: An African Portrait and The Roadmakers by Willis E. Bell and Efua T. Sutherland, and also features younger artists who reflect on and reframe the country’s archival legacy.
While some of the names at Arles use AI and digital processes to visualise their remodelled worlds, others find respite in analogue image-making. Photomontage and collage have historically been a method of resisting mainstream media and deinstitutionalising publishing; both have re-emerged in recent years.
One practitioner is Thato Toeba, whose show Anyone Can Be Lucifer, is a disruptive and radically imaginative way to reposition – or repurpose – archival images from Lesotho in order to build alternative realities and histories. They challenge colonial and imperial narratives by employing photomontage, thus continuing a subversive tradition established by early Modernist movements such as Dada and Surrealism.
Another exciting facet of this year’s festival is the inclusion of North African/ Mediterranean artists who embrace interdisciplinary practice. Among them is Katia Kameli, whose ongoing film and archival project ‘The Algerian Novel’ examines the nation’s history and collective memory through images, testimony and feminist storytelling inspired by Assia Djebar.
Elsewhere, in Bent el Machta, Amira Lamti investigates the figure of the machta, the custodian of wedding ceremonies in the Tunisian Sahel – she uses photography, textiles and video to reinterpret, animate and complicate the traditions surrounding marriage. Both fulfil Rencontres d’Arles’ promise to be expansive and challenge dominant modes of image-making – a welcome approach, as we tackle an era overwhelmed by the question of whether we can trust photography to truly represent ourselves.
‘Les Rencontres d’Arles’ runs at various locations until 4 October. For more information visit rencontres-arles.com
A version of this story appeared in the August 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
