Wide Angle: Grand Arles Express Exhibitions and Beyond

A must-see in Marseille, the Centre Photographique Marseille presents the rediscovered archives of Photo Kegham, Gaza’s first professional photography studio, founded in 1944 by Kegham Djeghalian Sr., a survivor of the Armenian genocide. Rediscovered by his grandson in Cairo in 2018, these negatives bring back to life the everyday reality of a city that has now largely disappeared, while questioning the very nature of the archive.

At the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Marseille, an immersive installation by Louisa Babari, presented as part of the Mediterranean Season 2026, brings together photography, sound, archives and Berber mythologies to explore memories of North Africa.

Photography is also making its way into institutions across the Var, with 200 portraits brought together at Villa Tamaris Centre d’Art in La Seyne-sur-Mer to celebrate the medium’s bicentenary, and an exhibition at the Abbaye de La Celle, where Klavdij Sluban’s landscapes are imbued with an almost physical sense of solitude. In Island Solitudes, the island emerges as much as a mental territory as a geographical place.

Meanwhile, the Centre de la photographie de Mougins presents a major retrospective devoted to Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen, a chronicler of everyday life and ordinary people whose work combines a documentary, humanist and deeply personal perspective.

While the Pavillon Southway in Marseille documents the fragile habitats of the Calanques, Sébastien Arrighi explores the role of water in the relationship between humans and their environment at Carré d’Art Nîmes, through an installation combining archival and previously unseen images.

Water also features in an exhibition at the Cloître Saint-Trophime in Arles, where Lara Tabet and curator Yasmine Chemali, winners of the BMW ART MAKERS 2026 programme, have devised an installation in which images are revealed through the interaction of aquatic microorganisms with photosensitive surfaces.

Elsewhere, other invisible bonds are celebrated. At Campredon art & image in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, photography becomes the starting point for an intimate reflection on our relationship with others and ourselves, while at the MB Art Foundation in Monaco, photographs tell the story of the enduring friendship between painter Francis Bacon and photographer Peter Beard.

While Gallifet reveals François Halard’s inner landscapes through more than a hundred photographs, some shown for the first time, Lee Ufan Arles brings together photographic works by Park Chan-wook, the Korean director of 17 films, for the first time in France.

At LUMA Arles, the great Gerhard Richter surprises us by applying oil paint to photographic snapshots. Photography and painting cease to follow their own rules, disrupting our reading of the image in the vast ground-floor gallery of the LUMA Tower—the largest exhibition space in the Plein Sud network.