At the Rencontres d’Arles, between AI and photographers, the artistic ambiguity persists.
AI Takes Center Stage at Arles Photography Festival
The Rencontres de la photographie, which commenced on Monday, July 7th, in the Église des Trinitaires in Arles (Bouches-du-Rhône), features Brazilian artist Igi Lola Ayedun. Ayedun, a painter, sculptor, writer, and photographer, exhibits photographs created by training the generative artificial intelligence (AI) Midjourney with her own portraits, according to Thyago Nogueira, curator of the “Ancestral Futures” exhibition.
Nearby, another Brazilian artist, Mayara Ferrao, depicts lesbian love stories of former black slaves within a fantasized 19th-century setting. She also employed AI to transform a body of texts and images into photographic reality, giving life to archives that never existed. To address the omissions in history – these unrecorded LGBTQIA+ love stories – she had to fight hard against the machine, discovering that AI algorithms were incredibly racist, explains Mr. Nogueira. These are the only artists officially using AI in photography at Arles in 2025. “It is not yet explicitly stated in the Rencontres regulations because it is still very new, but it goes without saying that it must be mentioned on the labels to inform visitors,” assures Christoph Wiesner, director of the event.
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