The article highlights three photography exhibitions at the 2025 Rencontres d'Arles festival, titled "Disobedient Images." The first show features the late David Armstrong, a Boston School photographer, with vintage prints and contact sheets capturing 1970s-80s New York counterculture. The second, "On Country: Photography from Australia," presents works by Indigenous and non-Indigenous photographers that challenge colonial narratives and explore First Peoples' connection to land. The festival runs across multiple venues in Arles through summer and fall.
These exhibitions matter because they demonstrate photography's power to both document marginalized communities and confront historical injustices. Armstrong's intimate portraits preserve a vanished New York scene, while the Australian show reclaims photography as a tool for Indigenous self-determination. The festival's theme of "Disobedient Images" underscores how photography can resist dominant narratives, making it relevant to current debates about representation, colonialism, and cultural memory.