Arles 2026 : The Fnac Photographic Collection Retold by Natacha Appanah

Among the most anticipated exhibitions of the 57th edition of the Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles, running from July 6 to October 4, 2026, is Nos rêves lointains. Regards sur la collection photographique de la Fnac autour d’un récit de Natacha Appanah. Housed within the Espace Monoprix, the exhibition falls under the festival’s “Traversées” (“Crossings”) section, with this year’s overarching theme being “Des mondes à relire” (worlds to be reread). And what better way to reread the world than through the theme of travel, as interpreted by some of the greatest photographers of the past and present. The exhibition does not simply display photographs from the collection, but places them in dialogue with one another through the literary contribution of writer Natacha Appanah, offering a fresh perspective on one of France’s most significant corporate photographic collections through the union of photography and literature.

Since its founding in 1978, Fnac has built up a photographic heritage that today comprises nearly 1,800 prints, now held at the Musée Nicéphore Niépce in Chalon-sur-Saône. For this occasion, curators Fannie Escoulen and Laure Augustins selected around a hundred images centered on the theme of travel and movement, entrusting their reinterpretation to writer Natacha Appanah, winner of the 2025 Prix Femina for her novel La Nuit au cœur. Appanah does not comment on or describe the photographs; rather, she moves through them, inhabits them, arranging them into an original narrative that weaves together departures, returns, wanderings, and personal memory. The literary project, published by Gallimard this year as the exhibition catalogue, accompanies the show with a volume that extends the experience beyond the gallery walls.

The exhibition path brings together a mosaic of perspectives that, despite their geographical, stylistic, and temporal diversity, share the same underlying thread: the desire to look at the world and capture its many facets through the camera’s lens. A wide range of images is on display: from trains and passengers captured by Sebastião Salgado (1944–2025) to the Mongolian steppes of Sophie Zénon (1965); from Henri Cartier-Bresson’s (1908–2004) slices of life to Luigi Ghirri’s (1943–1992) Italian landscapes, bringing together works by contemporary photographers such as Wim Wenders (1945) and Raymond Depardon (1942) alongside those of past masters like Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) and Werner Bischof (1916–1954), further underscoring the diversity of the Fnac collection.

The exhibition space ranks among the festival’s most distinctive venues: the vast Espace Monoprix occupies the upper floor of a supermarket built in the 1960s, which visitors must pass through to access the various exhibitions. Like other festival venues, the Espace Monoprix is part of the broader project to rebuild and revitalize Arles’ city center, one of the key benefits the photography festival has brought to the city. For this exhibition, the bare architecture has been transformed into what might be described as an improbable “departure lounge,” a space of passage and transition that guides visitors through a genuine sensory journey. The staging is built around movements and echoes between the photographs and excerpts from Appanah’s texts, which visitors can read on pages displayed among the photographs, as if marking brief pauses in the visual journey to return to the writer’s words and narrative. The curators further enhanced the immersive quality of the exhibition by allowing visitors to follow Natacha Appanah’s soft voice as she reads her own text, guiding them from photograph to photograph.

Nos rêves lointains stands out not simply as a display of the Fnac collection, but above all as a reflection on the history of photography and on the figures who, through their particular ways of seeing, have managed to capture what it means to live amid the diversity of experiences and places that make up our world. Travel and exploration are themes as significant as they are broad, and already well-trodden in photography, so the risk of the exhibition coming across as a mere gathering of famous names and iconic images was a real one. However, the writer’s literary intervention succeeded in giving the whole a renewed sense of purpose, avoiding the trap of presenting the photographs as mere documents and instead transforming them into narrative territories to imagine and inhabit. Within the rich Rencontres d’Arles program, the exhibition has the merit of slowing down the visitor’s gaze, inviting contemplation and encouraging viewers to connect the photographs with words and concepts that go beyond the immediate representation of a landscape. The dialogue between photography and writing thus proves to be more than a curatorial device, it becomes the very heart of the project, offering an experience that speaks equally to photography enthusiasts and to readers in search of an unconventional journey.

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Information

• Exhibition title: Nos rêves lointains. Regards sur la collection photographique de la Fnac autour d’un récit de Natacha Appanah
• Venue: Espace Monoprix, boulevard Émile Combes / place Lamartine, 13200 Arles
• Dates: July 6 – October 4, 2026
• Hours: 9:30 AM – 7:30 PM
• Festival: Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles, 57th edition
• Related publication: Nos rêves lointains, Natacha Appanah, Gallimard, 2026