Disobedient Images: Arles 2025

The exhibitions at the Arles photography festival this year are regrouped under the title “Disobedient Images”. They offer a subversive vision of subjects from families to feminism, minorities to mainstream. Here are some of the highlights of the exhibitions depicting subjects from the English-speaking world.

Caroline Monnet Echoes from a Near Future

Canadian photographer and filmmaker Caroline Monnet’s exhibition focuses on the experiences of First Nations women in Canada today. Monnet is of Anishinaabe and French ancestry, and uses her photography to make modern images involving her subjects, in contrast to the anthropological images of First Nations women taken in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. The women wear futuristic versions of traditional tribal clothing, seeming to claim their place in our future world. (At the top of the page you can see the title image from the exhibition, Echoes from a Near Future). Monnet has also made a series of busts as a tribute to murdered and missing Indigenous women.

Kwame Brathwaite Black is Beautiful

Brooklyn photographer Kwame Brathwaite (1938-2003) was the originator in the Sixties of the phrase “Black is Beautiful” and the movement for African-Americans to adopt more natural styles of presenting themselves, rejecting chemical hair-relaxing products and skin lighteners that he perceived as an attempt adopt to white beauty values.

Inspired by the writings of Marcus Garvey, Brathwaite co-founded the African Jazz-Arts Society and Studios, which produced concerts and promoted civil rights, and the rights of Africans in South Africa and Namibia. Brathwaite also co-founded Grandassa Models, an agency which centred on natural Black beauty, and photographed public figures like Stevie Wonder, Bob Marley, James Brown and Muhammad Ali.
Seeing Double

Carol Newhouse & Carmen Winant Double

Carol Newhouse and Carmen Winant met through the lesbian separatist movement in the 1970s and have developed long collaboration. For this year’s festival they chose to each shoot a roll of film they sent to the other side of the U.S.A. to the second photographer, who re-exposed it, using a technique of double exposure to tell a m>ore complex tale.

Nan Goldin Stendhal Syndrome

Nan Goldin meantime is showing double images, created over the last 20 years, juxtaposing historic artworks from museums and galleries around the world with similar poses created by Goldin with family and friends. "Stendhal syndrome" describes a feeling of being overwhelmed by beauty, especially in art in the city of Florence.

Family Stories
One section of the festival is called "Family Stories" and two exhibitions, each focusing on a missing parent, make an interesting counterpoint.

Diana Markosian, Father

Diana Markosian’s exhibition is just titled Father. She was born in Moscow but when she was seven her mother took Diana and her brother to live in the U.S.A., without informing their father. Her mother literally cut her father out of family photos, an image that haunts Markosian’s work. At the age of 23, she set out to find her father in Armenia.

Keisha Scarville Alma/Mama's Clothes

Brooklyn photographer Keisha Scarville, on the other hand, can only evoke the memory of a missing parent. After her mother’s death, Scarville started a series of images of herself hidden under her mother’s clothes.

Arles Les rencontres de la photographie
All exhibitions: 7 July-5 October 2025

Don't miss our articles on more exhibitions at Arles: "On Country: Photographing Australia" and "On the Street, On the Road".