The 57th edition of Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, widely regarded as the world's most prestigious photography festival, is being celebrated less for its big-name artists than for its eccentric, amateur and little-known contributors. The reviewer argues that this year's quirkier, more playful programme — light on major living artists, with only modest shows by figures such as William Klein and Edward Steichen — thrives on the strangeness and storytelling of unexpected work.

A highlight is We Are Not Alone: Alien Images, drawing on archives of faked UFO and close-encounter photographs, mostly made in the US between the 1960s and 1980s, alongside a film on the 1995 Alien Autopsy hoax. Elsewhere, the late Ivorian photographer Paul Kodjo receives his first major solo show in France, featuring 1960s–70s staged "photo novels" from Abidjan, drawn from an archive of thousands of negatives preserved over 15 years. At Luma Arles, Animal Model surveys 200 years of animal photography — from 19th-century naturalism to TikTok clips — featuring artists such as Elliott Erwitt, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Masahisa Fukase, while concurrent shows by Verena Paravel and Saodat Ismailova explore nature, folklore and non-human ways of perceiving the world.