Photography has always been implicated in power. It does not simply record the world — it organizes it, determining what enters the frame and what remains outside it, whose presence is legible and whose is rendered invisible. The Discovery Award Louis Roederer Foundation at the Rencontres d'Arles has, since its creation, used this medium's political stakes as its starting point — not by celebrating photography's capacity to document, but by asking what it takes to use it responsibly, with full awareness of the systems it operates within.

This year, that question was entrusted to Nadine Hounkpatin — born in Bohicon, Benin, and working between Europe, Africa and the African diasporas as an arts consultant, curator and co-founder of TheArtMomentum. Her practice has long centered the visibility of Black artists and the critical examination of how dominant narratives are constructed, sustained and contested. She arrived at this year's selection through a specific provocation: the removal of a historical photograph of a slave's flogged back from exhibition spaces in US national parks, the censorship of a painting by Amy Sherald in Washington, and the cancellation of an exhibition dedicated to Caribbean art at the Centre Pompidou-Metz led her to consider the place of images in the construction of reality, and consequently, the truth. These are not isolated incidents. They are symptoms of a broader condition — one in which the visible is actively managed, and in which images, far from being neutral records, become sites of contestation, suppression and resistance.

The seven artists she presents approach photography with that condition as their foundation. Spanning West and Central Africa, North Africa, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and the African diaspora in Europe, what unites them is not geography but a shared level of consciousness: working in the charged territory between disclosure and withholding, between what the body carries and what history has chosen to erase, between what is shown and what is deliberately, carefully, withheld. The truth, in their practices, is not a property of the image. It is something built — from silence, from absence, from what persists in the margins.

Souleymane Bachir Diaw uses family photographs to examine how patriarchal models are transmitted and sustained through images. In Sutura — a word meaning both modesty in Wolof and suture in Latin — he stages a performed body, often veiled or wrapped in textiles from the Sahel, Europe and the Middle East. His work combines photography, installation and sound to examine the processes of transformation affecting memory, space and materials, weaving together intimate experience and collective dynamics. Silence, in his work, is not absence. It is the matter from which resilience emerges — the space in which bodies, marked by historical and cultural legacy, find ways to speak through restraint rather than declaration.

Jordan Beal takes AI-generated images of his native Martinique and photographs them on a Polaroid SX-70 — materializing the digital into something fragile, saturated and unstable. He sees artificial intelligence not as innovation but as a continuation of colonial extraction: the extraction of data and imaginaries following that of bodies and lands. His practice does not perceive AI as a rupture but as a reactivation of the extractive logics that have long defined Martinique's relationship to external power. The resulting images resist immediate comprehension, arousing sensation before delivering meaning. Working in the tradition of Édouard Glissant, Beal proposes a relational and situated truth — made of traces and resistances rather than complete accounts, existing in the opacity of what cannot be fully deciphered.

Mallory Lowe Mpoka weaves photography through Jacquard textiles, beadwork and installation, approaching each work as an active space for the construction and transmission of identity. Her practice interrogates how images shape the self in contexts marked by colonial rupture, migration and the erasure of memory, drawing on family archives and the suppressed history of colonial violence in the Bamiléké region of Cameroon. Four works are presented in dialogue: In the Weft of Memory, in which photographs and self-portraits intertwine with Jacquard weave; Trilogia, exploring weaving as a process of transmission between women; Procession I & II, which introduces visual disturbances into archival photographs to mark the silences of a fragmented history; and the film She Who Summons, a ritual dance between two women that turns the body into a medium of memory. For Mpoka, the image is living matter: woven, fragmented, performed.

Amira Lamti takes the Machta — the figure who presides over wedding rites in the Tunisian Sahel — as a point of departure rather than a subject of documentation. Working across photography, video and textiles, she fragments and reassembles the gestures and scenes of the nuptial tradition, treating ritual as alive and subject to reinvention. A graduate of the IBSAS Higher Institute of Fine Arts of Sousse and selected for the ENSP Arles mentorship program, her work has been presented at the Jaou Tunis Biennale, Image Festival Amman and the Saudi Arabia Museum of Contemporary Art. The work deliberately displaces gender codes — her brother appears in the series wearing attributes conventionally associated with the feminine, revealing the malleability of roles and symbols within the rite itself. Ritual, in her hands, becomes a terrain of possibility.

Charlotte Yonga builds images from the intimate bonds she weaves with her subjects in Madagascar, exploring “fitiavana” — a Malagasy word that simultaneously translates friendship, family love, romantic love and attachment to life. She makes visible what is rarely explicit — the delicate rituals and silences of a young generation navigating between inherited tradition and personal aspiration. The series questions the lack of representation of Indian Ocean identities, documenting the tensions of a generation that, in 2025, rose up with the defiant strength of those who demand above all to be heard — giving Yonga's intimate archive an unexpected political charge. It is through her photography that honesty, presence and care coalesce into a gaze that is, above all, deeply human.

Phan Quang explores a little-known chapter of Vietnamese history: the fate of women who had children with Japanese soldiers who remained in Vietnam after World War II. These unions were often silenced and stigmatized, leaving behind gaps and identities marked by absence. Each subject is photographed in their domestic space, enveloped in a traditional white wedding veil — at once a symbol of interrupted union, a remnant of the past, and a mark of restraint. Facing these fragmentary accounts, Quang does not fill the voids — he inhabits them poetically, connecting historical accounts to intimate stories in the most fair and respectful manner. The image becomes a space of negotiation between revelation and concealment, individual memory and national narrative. Concealment, in his practice, is not absence. It is another form of testimony.

Magali Paulin works in the Jardin d'agronomie tropicale in Nogent-sur-Marne — originally a colonial experimental garden, transformed in 1907 to host the Nogent Colonial Exhibition. Amid dense vegetation, the ruins of pavilions once dedicated to France's colonial territories are slowly consumed by mold and decay — forgotten yet resistant to full erasure. Working with a large-format camera, Paulin embraces slowness as method, forging an attentive encounter with a landscape haunted by its own past. Also, echoing the thinking of Édouard Glissant, Matter, Phantoms reminds us that nothing exists in isolation — that each fragment of memory and ghostly structure finds its meaning in the story it composes with others. In her photography, truth does not impose itself. It is carefully navigated, like an old garden haunted by its own past.

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