Les Rencontres d'Arles
International open call for galleries and art spaces to nominate an emerging photographer for exhibition and prizes up to €15,000 at Arles 2027.
The Rencontres d'Arles invites galleries, art centres, artist-run spaces, community spaces, institutions and independent exhibition venues to submit a nomination for the 2027 Discovery Award Louis Roederer Foundation — part of the festival's landmark 58th edition.
This award exists to shine a light on emerging artists working with images, giving their work international visibility through exhibition at one of the world's most celebrated photography festivals. Applications are open from 9 October to 8 December 2026.
Who can apply?
Organisations — not individual artists — must apply. Each organisation may nominate one artist or artist collective. The nominated artist's work must have been recently discovered or deserves broader international attention. If selected, both the organisation and artist agree not to show the project elsewhere before its Arles premiere.
The 2027 theme: The Generative Eye
This year's curator is Yining He, a researcher and curator working across the UK and China, whose practice focuses on philosophy of technology, media ecology, and global photographic art. She invites artists to respond to the shifting conditions of contemporary visual production — the way images have become infrastructure, trained into algorithms, extracted from labour, and increasingly generated rather than captured. She's not looking for work that simply illustrates this situation, but work that pushes back against it, argues with it, and carves out new space within it.
What selected organisations receive:
The prizes:
All acquired works enter the Rencontres d'Arles permanent collection.
What to include in your application:
Key dates:
For questions, contact Éline Gourgues at prix.decouverte@rencontres-arles.com.
