For a few months every summer, Arles stops being a small Provençal town and turns into one long gallery. The photography festival is the reason most people come, but it is far from the only reason to stay. Between the Roman stone and the Rhône you can fill a whole weekend with art, from the world's most important photography festival to its free, scrappy counterpart, by way of a Frank Gehry tower and a couple of foundations that know exactly what they are doing. There is even a loose thread running through this year's shows, a shared interest in what usually slips past the eye: memory, perception, the thing just outside the frame. Here is how to spend two or three days in the thick of it.

William Klein, Wings of The Hawk, 42nd Street, New York, 1955. Courtesy of the William Klein Estate. Courtesy of Rencontres d’Arles

Les Rencontres d'Arles

Start where everyone else does. The world's oldest and most important photography festival returns for its 57th edition, running 6 July to 4 October under the title "Des mondes à relire," or Worlds to Revisit. Some forty exhibitions take over the city's heritage sites, from twelfth-century cloisters to old industrial halls, so half the pleasure is just walking between them. This year leans into transmission and the reading of images, with a focus on the African continent and Ghana in particular, solo shows for William Klein, Ming Smith and Harry Gruyaert, and a sprawling survey of two hundred years of animal photography at La Mécanique Générale.

If you can time it, the opening week from 6 to 12 July is when the festival runs at full volume, with award ceremonies and the famous nightly screenings in the Roman theatre. Buy a pass rather than single tickets and pace yourself. Nobody sees all forty shows, and the ones you wander into tend to beat the ones you planned.

Photo by Clelia Montali from “Liminal States” (2026) Courtesy of Marie Laffont

Festival OFF Arles

Running alongside the official festival is its free, independent counterpart. Organised by the association La Kabine and now in its third edition, the OFF turns galleries, shopfronts and unexpected corners of town into a free showcase of emerging and independent photography from 6 July to 5 October. Nothing costs anything, the work skews younger and more experimental, and it is the part of the weekend that pays you back for wandering with no plan.

A good place to anchor your time in the OFF is "Liminal States," put together by Marie Laffont at 4 Rue de Grille. It builds out from the photography of New York-based artist Clelia Montali, whose layered, mixed-media images place her subjects behind a kind of veil and quietly turn the viewer into a participant. Her work here circles the contemporary refusal to think about mortality, and the systems we use to look away from it. Around her, the designer Sophie Dries shows STYX MIRROR, a polished steel and bronze piece named for the mythological river, as well as “The Candle Holders.” The sculptor Malù Dalla Piccola contributes fragile, suspended forms about memory and absence. There is an opening cocktail on Monday 6 July, 6 to 9pm, in partnership with Ruinart, if you want to catch it on the first night.

The Tower at sunset Photo: © Adrian Deweerdt

LUMA Arles

A short walk from the centre, LUMA Arles occupies the Parc des Ateliers, the former railway yards Maja Hoffmann turned into a sprawling art campus crowned by Frank Gehry's crumpled steel tower. The headline this season is Gerhard Richter's Overpainted Photographs, shown inside the Tower, a body of work where he drags paint across small photographs until image and gesture blur into something genuinely unstable. Pair it with Camille Henrot's immersive new film "In the Veins," and, in July, "CORRESPONDENCES," a collaboration between Patti Smith and Soundwalk Collective that lands somewhere between concert, installation and film.

LUMA is also where the lunch question solves itself without making you leave the art. The Café du Parc was designed by the artist Kerstin Brätsch, so even the coffee stop is worth a look, and the Drum Café runs a menu that shifts with the season. Useful to know if you would rather not break the day hunting for a table in town.

Lee Ufan “Relatum-The Stage” (2022) Courtesy of Lee Ufan Arles

Lee Ufan Arles

When the festival noise gets to be too much, this is the antidote. The Korean artist, a founder of Japan's Mono-ha movement, took a sixteenth-to-eighteenth-century mansion and had his old friend Tadao Ando line it with concrete, and the result is one of the quietest, most deliberate spaces in the city. You move from a raw concrete spiral at the entrance through rooms of stone-and-steel Relatum sculptures and pared-back paintings, the kind where a single brushstroke is left to carry the whole canvas. It resets your eyes before you head back into the crowds.

"The Langlois Bridge in Arles, with a lady with an umbrella." (1888), Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum

Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles

No weekend in Arles is really complete without a nod to the painter who put it on the map, and the Fondation avoids the obvious every time. Its summer show, "SUSPECTS: Van Gogh, Tricksters & Co.," running to 18 October, gathers artists who, like Van Gogh, picked dissidence over conformity and excess over restraint. The Fondation rarely shows Van Gogh straight, preferring to set a painting or two in conversation with living artists, which is exactly what makes it worth the stop.

One weekend, five venues, and more photography than is strictly sensible. Wear good shoes, buy the festival pass, and let the OFF fill in the gaps. If you want a slower build up to Arles, check out our Art Lover's Drive Through the South of France Guide Here!