Amira Lamti, Amen, 2024, courtesy the artist
By aperturewp - Source: Aperture
Visitors to Rencontres d’Arles will know the long, hot walk down the circular ring road that surrounds the old city, echoing the shape of the bullring at its center, to the brutalist Monoprix supermarket at its end. For the duration of the storied annual photography festival in southern France, the crescent-shaped building—topped by large yellow cement blocks bearing its name—hosts multiple exhibitions, accessible only by passing through the high-end store’s clothing section. This year, half of the floorspace above the store is dedicated to the festival’s Louis Roederer Foundation Discovery Award. Set in an unlikely venue, this cohesive yet competitive show honors up-and-coming voices in photography.
The exhibition The best possible way to tell the truth… presents the work of seven artists: Charlotte Yonga, Souleymane Bachir Diaw, Phan Quang, Amira Lamti, Jordan Beal, Mallory Lowe Mpoka (winner of the public vote), and Magali Paulin (recipient of the jury prize). Selected by curator Nadine Hounkpatin, they bring perspectives from Vietnam, Senegal, Martinique, France, Cameroon, and Tunisia—a diversity echoed in their practices and in how their work is realized and displayed. “What above all unites these seven artists is a shared intellectual and ethical commitment. Each approaches photography as a space of inquiry, one in which images construct meaning, negotiate memory and inheritances, and challenge dominant narratives, rather than simply documenting reality,” Hounkpatin explains.
Magali Paulin, Indochina Pavilion built for the 1907 Nogent-sur-Marne Colonial Exhibition, July 2024 Courtesy the artist
Magali Paulin, Former greenhouses of the Colonial Garden in Nogent-sur-Marne, built around 1899, July 2024 Courtesy the artist
Martinican-French artist Paulin uses photography and text to tell the story of the Jardin d’Agronomie Tropicale in Nogent-sur-Marne, near Paris, which dates back to 1907. Paulin photographed the site and traced its history; in the installation, two photographs are left propped on the floor rather than hung, echoing the unresolved nature of colonialism. “The garden of Nogent immediately struck me as one of the matrixes of the plantation system,” Paulin says. “It was a place where the extraction of both natural resources and knowledge was organized, and where agricultural strategies for France’s colonial territories were developed. A place responsible for so many sufferings.”
Rendered in black and white, the images carry an aura of stillness. Details of plants, figures, and structures are isolated to bring the garden’s history into focus. One photograph shows a monolith inscribed only with the word NOIRS, drawing attention to a detail from a monument to the Black soldiers who died for France. “I was deeply unsettled by the presence of the former colonial pavilions and the memorials dedicated to colonial soldiers,” Paulin explains. “The park itself is peaceful, wooded, removed from the bustle of central Paris. It was precisely this paradox that drew me in. The site revealed itself to me as a haunted space, but also as a place from which to think about the broader haunting of colonial history in public space.”
Mallory Lowe Mpoka, still from She Who Summons, Mbour, Senegal, 2025. Color, sound, 9 minutes, 52 seconds Courtesy the artist
Mpoka’s series Cosmologies of the Heiresses uses textile, film, and found photography to tell the story of her coming of age after the passing of her mother, which leaves her as the matriarch of her family. Alongside Mpoka’s film work and staged photography, two large woven works in warm, ochre shades depict her and her mother, with the images in negative shown on the reverse of each work. “What compelled me was recognizing that my experience wasn’t unique,” Mpoka says. “So many women, particularly Black women, inherit responsibility at a very young age and are expected to move through that quietly, almost as though it were inevitable. Those experiences often become invisible because they’re understood as duty rather than something worthy of reflection.”
Phan Quang, Re/cover No. 7, Hanoi, Vietnam, 2014, from the series Re/cover, 2013–16 Courtesy the artist and Gallerie Bao
Quang’s series offers a moving investigation into the lives of women who had children with Japanese soldiers in Vietnam after World War II. In some cases, the soldiers were compelled to leave when they were repatriated, separating them from their partners and children and leaving those families vulnerable and often without contact. In his images, subjects are veiled in fabric—an emblem of the shadows these separations cast over their lives. Photographed over the past five years, the series will be expanded to other affected countries in Asia.
Focusing on their native Martinique, Beal’s Linaments uses AI to explore how tropical islands are imagined and how the visual trope of paradise is constructed. Martinique, an island in the Caribbean, was colonized by the French in 1635, triggering multiple disasters—from the displacement of the Indigenous Kalinago to a sugar industry powered by enslavement. Beal generated images of the island with AI and then photographed them on a screen. The resulting photos are grainy and dreamlike, raising questions of history, exoticism, and desire.
Jordan Beal, A photo of the horizon in Martinique I*, 2025 Courtesy the artist*
Diaw’s series Sutura explores silence and the unspoken within families. Drawing on precise compositions and symbolism, Diaw builds work from unanswered questions, crafting multifaceted responses. He poses his subjects, then photographs partial bodies or figures that are partly concealed and difficult to discern, evoking what remains unsaid in family dynamics. “I generally construct an image by gathering, in a specific location, people, artifacts, fabrics, and garments I want to work with,” Diaw says. “After that, I activate them in a performative and intuitive way, using sequencing and repetition—whether through still life or self-portraiture. This way, I build a kind of catalog of aesthetics and meanings, which will later be integrated into a network.”
Lamti’s work Bent el Machta explores the traditionally female role of the matcha, guardian of wedding rites in Tunisia’s Sahel, through photographs printed both traditionally and onto fabric. “Traditional fabrics, such as the safsari, became important elements within the work—not only as backgrounds or surfaces, but as materials that hold their own histories and meanings,” Lamti says. Through staged images, collage, and documentary photographs, she presents facets of this tradition, including an image of her brother wearing the matcha’s traditional dress. “The project is connected to Tunisian and wider North African contexts, and more specifically to the evolving experiences of women, who continue to redefine themselves and their place within contemporary life while remaining connected to their ancestral roots,” she explains.
Souleymane Bachir Diaw, Worn White Grand-Bubu with Golden Embroidery and Green Headscarf, Grey Area, 2021, from the series Sutura (2021–ongoing) Courtesy the artist
Charlotte Yonga, Dïane, Mahenina and Belly, Antananarivo, Madagascar, 2024 Courtesy the artist
“The combination of photography and drawing comes afterwards. I bring them together quite instinctively, often through analogies of form or color,” says Yonga, who shoots on film and, while waiting for it to be developed, makes abstract drawings based on her memory of the experience of making the photographs. (Tsy) Possible, made during a residency in Madagascar, looks at the full spectrum of love and relationships. Her tender images of couples, single portraits, and the beauty of Madagascar offer a window onto a place at a specific time.
These projects expand on the postcolonial themes that have created exciting conversations in photography in recent years, using tools from outside of photography to highlight their key ideas. Here, multiple voices speak on vastly different themes in a variety of ways, yet the exhibition as a whole focuses on a single point—the power of truth. From unearthing the history of a public park to the devastating reality of colonialism as seen through the lens of AI, the truth is as platformed as it is up for grabs. At Rencontres d’Arles, one of the centers of the establishment, this feels like a true platform for the contemporary.
The best possible way to tell the truth… is on view at Rencontres d’Arles, France, through October 4, 2026.
