Rencontres d’Arles 2025: Photography That Questions Power

Some photography festivals celebrate beauty. Others celebrate innovation. The Rencontres d’Arles 2025 festival asks a harder question: who holds the power to shape what we see?

Running until October 5 in Arles, France, this year’s edition carries the theme “Disobedient Images.” It invites photographers to rethink archives, challenge official narratives, and experiment with storytelling that resists easy answers. You can read Wallpaper’s full review here.

What Stands Out This Year

• AI-driven portraits by Mayara Ferrão show Black lesbian love, reclaiming visual space long erased by traditional archives.
• Family archives by Diana Markosian and Camille Lévêque expose how memory and power shape the way family stories are told—and sometimes distorted.
• Reimagined Americana by Karen Knorr and Anna Fox revisits Berenice Abbott’s classic Route 1 journey, layering today’s symbols of nationalism and consumerism into the frame.
• On Country: Photography from Australia places Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists side by side, showing how land, culture, and memory intertwine.

These exhibits don’t just show images; they interrogate them. They ask us to look at who is speaking, who is missing, and what a photograph can obscure.

Why It Matters

For travel and documentary photographers, this festival is a reminder that images are never neutral. Every frame carries perspective and power. As Anthony Schiliro often reflects in his work, photography is not just about capturing a place—it’s about asking what stories are being told and who gets to tell them.

Rencontres d’Arles 2025 proves that photography can act as resistance. It can question nationalism, reveal hidden family histories, and create new futures through collaboration and reinterpretation.

Takeaway for Your Photography

• Revisit your own archives—old family albums, past travel photos, or community images. What stories can you uncover by looking again?
• Experiment with ambiguity. Not every image has to provide an answer—sometimes questions are more powerful.
• Think about collaboration. Like the festival’s Australian program, photography can be a shared narrative rather than a single viewpoint.

For anyone who sees photography as a language of culture, identity, and power, Arles this year is essential.