Every summer, the French city of Arles fills up with photographers, artists, and curious visitors from around the world. In 2026, the 57th edition of Rencontres d’Arles runs until October 4. This year’s theme is Worlds in View. Exhibitions pop up all across the city, in churches, former industrial halls, and atmospheric historic spaces. Walking through Arles feels like a journey between different cultures, eras, and ways of seeing.
Africa and the Mediterranean as the Season’s Central Theme
This year’s programme pays special attention to stories from Africa and the Mediterranean. One of the main highlights is the exhibition GHANA! Dreaming Independence, 1957-1976. It explores how photography helped shape the image of a newly independent country. Featuring photographers like James Barnor and Felicia Abban, the exhibition brings together portraits, documentary images, and historical material. All of it brims with optimism, style, and political energy.
Also worth attention is the exhibition Animal Model: 200 Years of Photography. It’s thoughtful and playful at once. It traces how the relationship between people, animals, and the camera has changed over two centuries. Alongside Elliott Erwitt’s witty dog photographs hang Rinko Kawauchi’s lyrical images. Stories of people who formed unusual bonds with wildlife round it out. It’s an appealing choice for seasoned photography lovers and families alike.
Who Is James Barnor
James Barnor, for one, is no random name. He was born in Ghana in 1929 and became the country’s first full-time newspaper photographer. In 1959, two years after Ghana’s independence, he moved to London, where he discovered colour photography. He later returned to Ghana and built the country’s first colour photo lab. His career thus spanned two continents and six decades. From black-and-white portraits of independence to colour shots of swinging sixties London.
Distinctive Photographic Voices
The festival also celebrates several distinctive photographic voices. The exhibition Soul of the City presents Martine Barrat’s warm, compassionate photographs of Harlem, the Bronx, and Paris. William Klein, meanwhile, reveals the bold, political, and experimental side of his work in This Way to Heaven. Another visual treat is A Sense of Place by Harry Gruyaert. Here, intense colour transforms streets, landscapes, and everyday moments into something almost cinematic.
Paul McCartney: Photographer in the Eye of the Storm
Among the faces of Rencontres d’Arles 2026, Paul McCartney makes an unexpected appearance. The eighty-four-year-old musician has had a busy summer. Alongside his new, nineteenth solo album The Boys of Dungeon Lane, he’s also opening an exhibition of his own photographs. Eyes of the Storm at the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence shows more than 250 previously unseen images. McCartney took them between 1963 and 1964, at the height of Beatlemania. The photographs sat forgotten for decades, McCartney only rediscovered them in 2020 in his own archive, which holds nearly a thousand images in total.
At the time, he carried a simple Pentax camera with him. He used it to capture behind-the-scenes moments, fleeting glances, hotel rooms, and bus seats. His photographs also caught his three bandmates alongside their manager, Brian Epstein. The exhibition guides visitors chronologically, from black-and-white shots of Liverpool to colour snapshots of Paris. From there it moves on to New York and Miami, where the American tour peaked with the band’s legendary appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. The exhibition runs from July 4, 2026, to January 3, 2027.
William Klein and Fashion
William Klein, meanwhile, fused street photography with fashion back in the 1950s, right on the pages of Vogue. His unorthodox, grainy style shocked editors at the time. In the end, though, it influenced an entire generation of later photographers, from Guy Bourdin to contemporary editorial photography.
Nečakané a The Unexpected and the Contemporary
For something unexpected, there’s We Are Not Alone. It dives into photographs of UFO sightings and supposed encounters with extraterrestrials. Many of these images may be dubious as evidence. Together, though, they form an entertaining exploration of belief, imagination, and photography’s complicated relationship with truth. The exhibition CTRL: New Functions of Images brings that conversation into the present. It examines how digital technology and artificial intelligence are changing the way images are made, spread, and understood.
A Walk, Not a Checklist
There’s no need to see everything at once. Part of the pleasure lies in simply walking through Arles, stopping for coffee between exhibitions, and stumbling on surprising images behind ancient stone walls. With its mix of important histories, emerging talent, and playful visual ideas, Rencontres d’Arles 2026 is shaping up to be one of the most rewarding cultural destinations of the summer.
