Fonds Bustamante | Charles Zana — Église Sainte-Croix
Unveiled to coincide with the opening of this year’s Rencontres d’Arles, the Fonds Bustamante occupies the beautifully restored twelfth-century Église Sainte-Croix. Conceived as a space for exhibitions, research and artistic exchange, the foundation extends Jean-Marc Bustamante’s lifelong dialogue between photography, sculpture and installation. Charles Zana structured the interior across three levels, preserving the church’s dramatic volume while introducing warm materials and carefully controlled light. The result is restrained and contemplative, allowing the architecture and artworks to remain in quiet dialogue. (Full disclosure: Charles Zana is a friend and one of Invisible Collection’s star designers.)
Les Rencontres d’Arles — Arles
7 July – 4 October 2026
Collectors know: in the blue-chip art world, photography has always been looked down upon, like the poor cousin from the countryside in a Jane Austen novel — the $12.4 million record set by Man Ray’s Le Violon d’Ingres notwithstanding. We love photography, and we want to celebrate it. This year’s edition of the Rencontres d’Arles features a total of 36 exhibitions, all worth seeing. However, here are four we particularly recommend.
Martine Barrat: Do or Die and Beyond — Espace Van Gogh
Martine Barrat at last! She had to blow out her 93rd candle to finally receive the museum-worthy retrospective that was long overdue. She is one of the heroines of documentary photography, seamlessly balancing political commitment with profound human empathy. Her photographs move through the South Bronx, Harlem and later Paris with extraordinary tenderness, portraying boxers, gangs and marginalised communities without sensationalism. Could this be the beating heart of this year’s Arles Festival? We say a thousand times yes.
We Are Not Alone: Alien Images — Église Sainte-Anne
Photography has always been a medium of striking contradictions: it records the truth and yet can be so easily manipulated. With this in mind, what a delight it is to discover this remarkable survey of UFO photographs, amateur investigations and supposed extraterrestrial encounters. Rather than asking whether the images are authentic, the exhibition examines photography as an instrument of belief and collective imagination. It is witty, intelligent and almost necessary in an era increasingly defined by AI-generated imagery and contested truths. The truth is out there… is it?
Ming Smith: Wandering Light — Église Sainte-Anne
Ming Smith’s first solo exhibition in France — and it’s about time. For the record, she was the first African American female photographer whose work entered the collection of MoMA. Her images are never quite what they seem, as though light dissolved figures into atmosphere and memory, hovering between documentary and dream. Drawing equally from jazz, spirituality, African American cultural history and her travels through Europe, Smith conjures a body of work that is quietly radiant and visually transporting.
Being There — Église Saint-Blaise (Abbaye Saint-Césaire)
It’s almost miraculous how a simple artifice can shake our perception of reality while tackling profound existential questions. Drawing on anonymous photographs from Lee Shulman’s The Anonymous Project, Being There sees Senegalese artist Omar Victor Diop seamlessly insert himself into images from which Black figures were historically absent. The intervention is subtle yet transformative, inviting viewers to reconsider photography’s role in shaping collective memory. A powerful illustration of how representation has been constructed, the exhibition reveals how our shared history can be retold through the omissions embedded within twentieth-century photographic archives.
Animal Model — LUMA Arles, La Mécanique Générale
If you are not too exhausted or overwhelmed by the sheer variety and density of the Arles Festival, take the time to visit LUMA. Getting there is easy: simply head towards Frank Gehry’s gleaming tower at the edge of the city — you can’t miss it. Among the many exhibitions on view, Animal Model is well worth the detour. Curated by Nathalie Herschdorfer, it traces nearly two centuries of animal imagery, moving effortlessly between Victorian natural history, scientific photography, contemporary art, internet culture and viral TikTok videos. At once playful and intellectually rigorous, it becomes a sophisticated meditation on how photography shapes our relationship with the non-human world.
François Halard: 56 Days in Arles, Libraryman
We know and love François Halard for his extraordinary photographs of artists’ homes around the world. Here, he offers something altogether more intimate. Created during the first lockdown in 2020, 56 Days in Arles brings together one Polaroid for each day he spent confined to his house in Arles. Turning his camera towards the world immediately around him — flowers, objects, fragments of light and quiet interiors — the book becomes a poetic meditation on time, solitude and beauty. Far from a diary of isolation, it reveals Halard’s gift for finding the extraordinary in the everyday.
Peter Stephan Jungk: The Darkrooms of Edith Tudor-Hart, Haus Publishing
Freshly published in English, this remarkable biography reads like a detective story. It traces the life of Bauhaus-trained photographer Edith Tudor-Hart, whose commitment to social documentary was matched by her clandestine work for Soviet intelligence, leading to her being remembered as “the mother of the Cambridge Five.” Drawing on years of research and family archives, Peter Stephan Jungk paints a nuanced portrait of a woman whose artistic achievements were long overshadowed by espionage. The result restores Tudor-Hart to her rightful place in the history of twentieth-century photography while revealing the convictions that shaped both her images and her extraordinary life.
Alexandra Campbell: Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc: A Timeless Legend on the French Riviera, Rizzoli
Published to mark the hotel’s 150th anniversary, and featuring an introduction by the ineffable Graydon Carter, this richly illustrated volume chronicles the history of one of the Côte d’Azur’s most legendary addresses. Alexandra Campbell combines archival photographs, personal anecdotes and historical documents to trace the hotel’s evolution from a writers’ retreat to an enduring symbol of Riviera glamour, immortalised by photographers such as Slim Aarons and Jacques Henri Lartigue. (Full disclosure: a collection of furniture specially conceived by Laclaux for the hotel’s restaurant, The Grill, overlooking the iconic pool, is now available exclusively through Invisible Collection.)
Bonus track:
A sidebar before getting to the music: we know his ability to play many instruments and his genius for composing some of the most memorable melodies in popular music. Now we discover that Paul McCartney wasn’t so bad at handling a camera either. Paul McCartney: Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm, on view at the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence as a satellite exhibition of the Rencontres d’Arles, is an intimate photographic journey through the Beatles at the height of Beatlemania. Snapshots of a myth in the making — from hotel rooms to backstage and on the road — conjure a feeling of innocence and effortless cool, as though everything came easily. Which brings us to the White Album and Blackbird. This extraordinary song deserves to be heard in its many interpretations. Too many to list, but here are our favourites, from the most recent by the one and only Queen Bey to a haunting Gaelic version by Julie Fowlis… Enjoy!
Blackbird by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, 1970
