In a few months, we all hope, this unique event on the art of photography will begin. This year’s festival features around twenty exhibitionsin Arles, and several other sites associated with the festival in the region, as part of Grand Arles Express, including Mucem, FRAC PACA, Collection Lambert, and Centre Photographique Marseille. In his first official year as festival director, Christoph Wiesner has chosen to emphasize emerging artists. The 2021 Louis Roederer Discovery Award will be showcased in particular, with Sonia Voss as curator and Amanda Antunes for scenography. The festival also reflects the social changes that photography is continually attesting to, featuring, notably, a section on the topics of gender and identity. With emerging scenes, large group exhibitions, powerful themes, established artists and artists from around the globe figuring prominently, the festival is undeniably a major event in photography.

The Ministry of Culture backs the Rencontres d’Arles with energy, pride, and conviction. With that, I’d like to wish every success to the 52nd year of the Rencontres d’Arles, and thank everyone on the team for their tenacity and passionate defense of photographers and photography.

WORD FROM THE MAYORPatrick de CarolisMayor of Arles“How good it is to steer forever towards desire” Frédéric Mistral justly wrote. After long months, so hard and so deprived of cultural exchange and artistic emotion, it is equally right to express how eagerly we await the Rencontres d’Arles 2021.This year’s festival is unique because it celebrates two different legacies: one of monuments conceded by UNESCO forty years ago, and one of photography, now an integral part of Arles’ heritage. These two legacies mirror each other as our monuments host festival exhibitions, lending them vivacity and resonance. The permanent back-and-forth movement between the History inscribed in stone and the one shown on gallery walls is at the very core of a festival which contributes to Arles’ international image.

And both these events attest to the lives of human beings, with their faith, their search for light, their desire to leave signs of their passage, tragic or sublime. Ultimately, over the years, the endless search for a manner to these memories we’d like to leave behind has established a genuine conversation between the city and photography. Thus spins the endless tale; we continue to feed it, helping it grow bigger, nourishing everyone through gatherings and exchange, supported by the State or local government, the Region and the Department.Thus, we are delighted to find new sites being uncovered, like the Jardin d’été opening to the festival for the first time this year, and soon our small towns and hamlets in Crau and the Camargue will welcome similar enterprises—anywhere, essentially, that invites the people of Arles to nourish themselves through exhibitions and what they express of the world which comes traveling to us. I am hoping that even more residents will come discover this year’s festival, and future festivals, because they are the ones to inherit this exceptional legacy, and those that take in photography in all its forms.Likewise, the Rencontres d’Arles is both founder and heir. It has shown work by photography’s pioneers, preserved, notably, in the magnificent collection at the Musée Réattu constituted by Jean-Maurice Rouquette and Lucien Clergue.

It has also articulated new trends and new, even unconventional perspectives by presenting artistic creation, enquiry and testimony to the public. The city of Arles and the Rencontres d’Arles share an affinity for light: the light shined on our streets and our natural heritage, and the light that writes the photographic image.Under the leadership of Christoph Wiesner and the whole Rencontres team, and the enduring commitment of Hubert Védrine, this light reflects back to tell us about the world.This year we celebrate Arles’ heritage, able to unite builders and creators. Each summer they demonstrate together that an hourglass alone doesn’t make something valuable, rather, it’s the understanding between these two, where the former stands as a living backdrop to the latter, endlessly searching for new techniques and effects.Would it have been possible for this International Photography to exist someplace else before coming to Arles? I prefer to think not, while feeling everyone’s mounting enthusiasm.Unable to exchange culture, we plunged into shadows which clouded the entire country.In July 2021, in Arles, light will break on the city, on its monuments, its residents, and on photography. Welcome please, once again, dear festival-goers.

WORD FROMTHE PRESIDENT Hubert VédrinePresident of the Rencontres d’ArlesThis summer, we will be especially happy to welcome you to Arles for the Rencontres de la photographie. More than ever, we need to get together and celebrate culture. The 51st edition did not take place in 2020, a year without festivals. In 2021, we will offer you the 52nd, a balance between key shows that could not be held last year and exciting new proposals. This is a transitional year between two directors: we welcomed Christoph Wiesner as the new head of the festival in September 2020.It is important for us to be present in Arles’ increasingly rich cultural ecosystem. Much to our delight, culture is growing by leaps and bounds in Arles.

The opening of Luma, planned for this summer, which we welcome, is eagerly anticipated well beyond Arles.The festival’s local and regional influence no longer needs demonstrating. The Grand Arles Express, in particular, is increasingly successful from year to year. In 2021, the Rencontres d'Arles will once again take place within a network of friendly institutions. Photography is once again highlighted and honored in the South of France.Even further afield, international cooperation remains on the agenda with the seventh Jimei x Arles International Photography Festival in November and a new collaboration with India’s Serendipity Arts Foundation that has led to the creation of a major grant for photography, video and new media. The grant will enable a young Indian artist to develop his project and present it at the Rencontres d'Arles in 2022. Like every year, the Rencontres d'Arles is sharing the adventure with jobless people. It thus plays a major social role in the Arles area.I can assure you that the Rencontres team is doing everything possible to welcome you to Arles this summer in the best possible conditions.

SUMMER OF FIREFLIESChristoph WiesnerDirector of the Rencontres d’ArlesShould we invent a new rite of passage for this very peculiar time? Retouch this blank year in technicolor? The urgency of the present calls for commitment above all—a commitment on the part of the Rencontres d’Arles to the photographers, artists, curators, partners and institutions with which the festival has forged such strong ties for so many years. Far from imagining a tabula rasa tempting us to break away from the suspended time induced by the pandemic, it becomes about reflecting on how to update a heritage: that of last year’s festival, developed by Sam Stourdzé around the theme of resistance, and the photography that in his words, “stands up, opposes, denounces...re-enchants.”

I wanted the program to be built around these premises, taking them further, with variations and echoes, new additions and derivations that allow us to grasp this force as well, the urgent need for the Rencontres d’Arles to gauge the pulse of the world. If the skies are not yet clear, if the light is still dim this summer, we must still make visible the multiplying bursts of light produced by the invited photographers and artists. If Pier Paolo Pasolini understood how the tension produced by the fierce spotlights of power threaten the flashes of light from opposing powers, Georges Didi-Huberman offers hope in Survival of the Fireflies (2009).

According to him, we must recognize a resistance in the smallest firefly, a light for all thought.” Photography continues to emit light signals, opening up spaces for new methods of resistance. Arles in midsummer will be like a constellation of fireflies, made up of a thousand lights illuminating the diversity of regards, polyphony of stories, and symbolizing the survival of hope and consciousness-raising by means of the image.The sites chosen for the festival this year offer as varied a scenery as an atmosphere, in keeping with the program’s diversity. They take place at heritage, historical sites downtown, at Atelier de la Mécanique in Parc des Ateliers, at Monoprix and Croisière, and out to several city gardens. In the Église Frères Prêcheurs at the center of Arles, Emergences takes up residence this year with the Louis Roederer Discovery Award in a new format.

Each year now, a new curator will express their vision of trends in young contemporary art. The year 2021 was entrusted to Sonia Voss, who uses a new design concept that puts the projects into dialogue with one other.A walk through the modernist building housing Monoprix leads to a universe where identity and fluidity come together. SMITH’s Desiderationis a multi-sensory exploration at the crossroads of different practices, in which photography, narration, fiction and form become one; it’s a voyage to a poetic cosmos, asking each one of us the essential question of our existence beyond gender and beyond bounds. Also, as the pandemic leads us to question the limits of humanity, Rethink Everything introduces us to a Latin American scene with a feminist practice probing the body as well as society in all its aspects. The question of representation is also addressed with the exhibition The New Black Vanguard, which celebrates the black body in all its diversity, striding the disciplines of art, fashion and culture.These multiple viewpoints on the world find an echo in Pieter Hugo’s introspective Being Present. A focus on the portrait brings us to many places on earth, but asks us to take the perspective of the other. And turning toward the other, to distant horizons, is also what the Atlas section offers. Here again, we’re invited to travel, and to look at a map covering geography, history, sociology and psychology.

So, we’ll find perspectives from South Africa, but also from Sudan and Chile, to move us across the globe. The Rencontres is also about revisiting the history of the medium of photography and its players. Thus, the opening of Charlotte Perriand’s archives express how photography and photomontage played a decisive role in her creative process, both in her aesthetic development and political involvement in the 1930s. Then we must mention Sabine Weiss, who turns 97 this year. Her work will be shown at the chapelle des Jésuites of the Museon Arlaten, a brand-new venue for the Rencontres.These are just the first flashes offered by the festival this summer. Along with the Rencontres’ executive director, Aurélie de Lanlay, and the entire team, we invite you to discover the rest of the program opening July 4th in Arles.