The Institute at the Rencontres d’Arles 2025

This summer, the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles will feature, among some sixty exhibitions, Room 207 by Jean-Michel André and they go their own way; they are stubborn; they throw a fit by Agnès Geoffray and Vanessa Desclaux, both of whom received various forms of support from the Institut pour la photographie.  
The programming of these exhibitions in Arles provides the Institute with an opportunity to  highlight the initiatives it has been developing since 2019 to support research and artistic creation and to promote photographic culture to a wide audience.

Room 207, Jean-Michel André

Room 207 was on view from October 16, 2024, to February 2, 2025, at the Musée de l’Hospice Comtesse (Lille) as part of the Institut pour la photographie’s off-site programming. Co-produced by the Institut pour la photographie and the Mediterranean Center for Photography in  Bastia, where it will be shown in the fall of 2025, the exhibition is being presented for the second time at the Espace Croisière during the 56th edition of the Rencontres d’Arles festival.

A photographer born in Nantes in 1976, Jean-Michel André lives and works between the Hauts-de-France region and the Camargue. 
Since graduating from the École des Gobelins in 2000, he has offered a political and poetic vision of the territory, exploring its boundaries, memory, and evolution.

Starting in 2019, following its participation in the first Openfolio organized by the Institut pour la photographie as part of its project Borders , a close collaboration with him began. It was particularly through educational and outreach projects that the Institute began working with the artist.

For more than two years, the Institut pour la photographie has been working on one of its most personal photography projects, Room 207. The personalized artistic guidance provided by Anne Lacoste, the director, and the exhibition design created by the Institute’s production department made it possible for this unique project to come to life as an exhibition. During its first run in Lille, the exhibition attracted more than 31,000 visitors.

↘︎ July 7–October 5, 2025
↘︎ Cruise, Arles

Learn more about the exhibition in Arles

they veer off course, they are stubborn, they rage, Agnès Geoffray 
Curator: Vanessa Desclaux

Before it became a performance-style lecture and then an exhibition presented at the Commanderie Sainte-Luce during the Rencontres d’Arles, they go their own way, they are stubborn, they throw tantrums , by artist Agnès Geoffray and curator and art critic Vanessa Desclaux, was a research project conducted using the institutional archival collections of the reform schools in Cadillac, Doullens, and Clermont de l’Oise—public institutions that placed underage girls between the late 19th century and the mid-20th century.

Originally titled Written Texts , in 2023, he was selected—along with three other projects—as a recipient of the Institute’s 5th annual Research and Creation Grant on the theme of The stories we tell, the stories we show : Photo-textual Strategies in the Reinvention of Narrative Forms .

as part of their participation in this support program, Agnès Geoffray and Vanessa Desclaux had the opportunity to present their project to students at La Cambre (Brussels) as part of the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels’ “Meeting Point” program, as well as at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, in a discussion with Philippe Artières, a French historian, as part of the annual seminar coordinated by Christian Joschke, a professor and art historian.

At the 5th anniversary celebration of the Institut pour la photographie’s Fellowship, held at the Jeu de Paume in May 2024, Agnès Geoffray and Vanessa Desclaux presented they go their own way, they are stubborn, they throw tantrums in the form of a performance-style lecture.

↘︎ July 7–September 21, 2025
↘︎ Sainte-Luce Commandery, Arles

Learn more about the exhibition in Arles