‘A monumental moment’: world’s leading photography festival puts Australia in focus

The French festival that has launched the careers of dozens of photographers over the past five decades is turning its focus to Australian artists and their unique relationship to country.

Les Rencontres d’Arles, the world’s oldest and most prestigious photography festival, will this year highlight the work of 20 Australian artists as part of a major exhibition opening in July in the Provençal city of Arles, renowned for its world heritage-listed Roman remains.

On Country: Photography from Australia will feature more than 200 photographic and photo media works by First Nations and non-Indigenous Australian photographers, exploring ancestral ties to place, the living cultural presence of country, and the complex relationship land has to language, family and identity. The lineup, curated by PHOTO Australia’s Pippa Milne and Brendan McCleary, includes the senior photographic and photomedia artists such as Ricky Maynard and Brenda L Croft along with mid-career artists such as Tony Albert and Atong Atem, and emerging artists reaching an international audience for the first time.

The director of Rencontres d’Arles, Christoph Wiesner, said the 2025 festival would mark a “monumental moment in the recognition of Australian photography”, introducing an expected 160,000-strong international audience to the breadth and complexity of contemporary Australian practice.

The Australian/French partnership was brokered by Elias Redstone, the founder and director of PHOTO Australia and the biennial PHOTO international festival of photography in Melbourne, with co-curation by the Yorta Yorta curator Kimberley Moulton, adjunct curator of Indigenous art for the Tate Modern in London and a senior curator for Melbourne’s Rising festival.

After moving to Australia from the UK eight years ago and establishing the country’s largest photographic festival, Redstone noticed the traffic was all going one way: Australia was getting to see the work of some of the world’s best photographers but there were too few opportunities for Australians to exhibit overseas. In addition to the Australian focus at Rencontres d’Arles this year, he has forged partnerships with the Victoria and Albert Museum and The Photographers Gallery in London, and festivals in Toronto and Kyoto.

“This exhibition is the largest realisation and potentially will have the most impact to date, and I’m sure we’ll be feeling the implications of the show for years to come,” he says.

First Nations people’s practice and relationship to country will lie at the core of the exhibition, challenging the colonial use of photography as a tool for ethnographic documentation in Australia and reconstructing the medium as a vehicle for truth telling, self-determination and collaboration.

The term “on country” is often used to describe the lands, waterways, seas and cosmos to which First Nations peoples in Australia are connected. Moulton says while First Nations people’s concepts of what it means to be on country are central to the Arles exhibition, the perspectives of non-Indigenous artists will also play an essential part.

“We are all on country, wherever we are,” she says. “We’re all on someone’s country, and we’re all guests on people’s country here, whether you’re Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, or whether you’re from a settler family or newly arrived. There’s a connection we all have to this place … and that’s what we want to communicate to a global audience.”

The Warakurna Superheroes series, developed by the Kuku Yalanji artist Tony Albert and the photographer David Charles Collins in collaboration with children from the remote Indigenous community of Warakurna in the Northern Territory, is a highlight of On Country, and also furnished the hero image for this year’s Rencontres d’Arles: a heroic shot of teen Kieran Lawson wearing a makeshift superhero costume, standing atop the rusted corpse of a car.

The 2017 series takes popular culture into a desert landscape, with children’s bright homemade costumes – Iron Man, Superman, the Hulk – vividly contrasting with the intense blue skies, ochre-coloured earth and a backdrop of abandoned cars and water tanks.

Warakurna Superheroes is a joyous celebration of the remote community, says Moulton, but the series also channels the power of self-determination, as these young Aboriginal people forge their own identities.

The 2012 series Ritual and Ceremony, by the Mutti Mutti, Wamba Wamba, Yorta Yorta and Boonwurrung multidisciplinary artist Maree Clarke, features portraits of 84 Indigenous men and women from Victoria, their faces and clothing adorned with white ochre.

Clarke has said the series “represents the mourning practices of Aboriginal people along the Murray-Darling rivers. It talks about loss of land, language and cultural practices.” It also asserts the continued presence of Aboriginal people in Australia’s south-east.

At Arles, the site-specific installation will include a three-metre-tall portrait of the late elder, activist and actor Uncle Jack Charles.

The work of Prof Brenda L Croft has received extensive exposure in Australia, the US, the UK, Europe and Japan.

In Arles, the artist of the Gurindji, Malngin and Mudburra peoples will present her 2024 series Naabami (thou shall/will see): Barangaroo (army of me), featuring 27 portraits of First Nations women and girls.

The series, which expands on her ongoing portraiture project, honours the Cammeraygal leader Barangaroo, the second wife of Bennelong, a senior man of the Eora nation, who served as mediator during the first British settlement. According to colonial records, Barangaroo was a woman not to be trifled with.

“She was known as a feisty, staunch woman who spoke her mind,” Croft says. “She refused to learn English. She refused to wear European clothing … I loved that sense of her spirit and her energy, and that’s what inspired the series.”

Croft used the 19th-century tintype collodion process, partly because she loves the “chemical mistakes” that make each portrait look aged and unique.

“It was also the process that was used in documenting many First Nations peoples in Australia as part of an ethnographic, eugenicist approach,” she says. “They were documenting the ‘dying races’. People were rarely identified by their name. They were lucky if they were identified by their language group. Sometimes they were identified by a region, and then there were studio setups for titillation.”

With a background in photojournalism and award-winning war reportage, Dubbo-born Adam Ferguson returned to Australia after covering the war in Afghanistan. He created his Big Sky series, capturing life in the contemporary outback from a non-Indigenous perspective, partly as a form of self-prescribed psychological therapy.

“I wanted to come back to Australia and connect with what felt like my land and my story,” he says.

It was his initial ambition to create a collection of portraits from rural Australia in a similar vein to Richard Avedon’s In the American West series.

“But as a white fella, I struggled with, ‘How do I photograph black Australia?’” he says.

Ferguson undertook extensive consultation and gave curatorial control to the communities in which he worked.

“We don’t need more images or more narratives that show marginalised lives in Australia,” he says.

“I felt that the only way that I could represent that part of the story I was telling was to show photos where Indigenous Australians were dignified and had an element of power and agency.”

“Chaotic, dystopian, but incredibly beautiful,” is how the Northern Territory photographer Liss Fenwick describes the town where they grew up: Humpty Doo, 40km south of Darwin, on the traditional lands of the Larrakia and Wulna people.

At Arles, Fenwick is presenting a 2023 photographic series documenting life in the town from their settler perspective, titled Humpty Doom.

“It’s a place that has a sense of perpetual crisis about it, which is where the title comes from. But there’s a transformation that I was trying to create with the visual language in this – the resilience of people who live there, who are like the masters of the doom.”

The saturated skies of Fenwick’s landscapes are ambiguous, treading a line between beauty and dread: is that a stunning sunset or an approaching wildfire? Fenwick approached each image like a portrait, giving objects “a sense of agency”: “I photograph a termite mound like it’s a model in a fashion shoot.

“In photographic history, there’s been a romanticism of the outback landscape … and maybe a lot of those renderings create a very passive setting for humans to come in and do what they want, exploit it through tourism or mining,” Fenwick says. “But these ‘things’ are living beings that have complex history.”

As a Bidjara man adopted into a white Queensland family, Michael Cookhas used photography to document his personal journey of questioning racial dominance and asserting connection to country in an urban setting.

At Rencontres d’Arles he will present his 2014 series Majority Rule, a visual response to the question: what would Australia look like if First Peoples were 97% of the population; if they had the voice of white Australia?

“White Australia has such huge opinions on how Aboriginal people should be or live in our society, even though a lot of people might not even know an Aboriginal person,” he says.

“So it was really just a role reversal of Australia, asking what if Indigenous people had the majority rule.”

The 1960s aesthetic of the images reflects a significant period of Australian history for First Nations people, one that echoed the civil rights movement in the US. It was the decade in which a referendum delivered the vote to Indigenous people – and it was also Cook’s formative era, raised by a mother who fought alongside First Nations peoples for equal rights and taught her son to cherish his Indigenous culture.

“She was always provoking questions within me – ‘what if’ scenarios. And I think that’s why my work comes across with an openness and a softness and a beauty to it,” Cook says.

“That’s been my whole job in the last 15 years of producing art – to make sure I’m asking questions and not shutting other people down, while creating something of beauty.”

• On Country: Photography from Australia runs in Arles, France, from 7 July to 5 October as part of Les Rencontres d’Arles