Our Distant Dreams

"Our Distant Dreams"

from Monday, July 6, 2026 to Sunday, October 4, 2026

Arles - Les Rencontres, Espace Monoprix

Mongolian Haikus, the very first photographs created by Sophie Zénon in the late 1990s, are presented as part of the exhibition Our Distant Dreams. Curated by Fannie Escoulen and Laure Augustins, the exhibition brings together photographs from the Fnac Collection, one of the most important corporate photography collections in France.

“What are the stories told by photographs made of? Do they contain ingredients that change over time—the grain of the years, the light that yellows and sometimes bursts into sparkles, the edges that soften like personalities, the hidden details that emerge?

Do they, like books, have the ability to unfold within us, to speak to us as though they existed solely for our gaze? Do they patiently wait for us to discover, at last, how they resemble us, how they mirror our sorrows and our hopes?”

Nathacha Appanah, Our Distant Dreams, Gallimard, 2026.


Driven from its inception by its founders’ commitment to photography, Fnac began building, in 1978, one of the most important corporate photography collections in France. Spanning nearly a century of photographic history, the 1,800 prints that make up the collection are now housed at the Nicéphore Niépce Museum in Chalon-sur-Saône.
This exhibition offers a new reading of this body of work. Through one hundred images and across several decades, it takes us to the far reaches of the territories explored by photographers, into the intensity of their relationship with landscape and their encounters with “the other, both near and distant.”

In dialogue with the images, writer Nathacha Appanah has imagined an original literary creation. Her words weave new narratives and open unexpected paths throughout the exhibition, giving it a renewed poetic dimension. Texts and images converse, intertwine, and sometimes collide, breathing new life into the collection.

While photography inherently carries the notion of movement, this movement is experienced as much through physical travel as through journeys of the imagination. This is exemplified by GLADYS’s image Little Ship, an oneiric metaphor for a suspended departure that will likely never take place.

Like points on a map, these images form a journey of waiting, roads, seas, desert horizons, faces, and shared stories. From the vast landscapes captured by Sigurgeir Sigurjonsson and Françoise Huguier to the contemplative wanderings of Antoine d’Agata and Jair Lanes, a sensitive cartography of the world emerges, shaped by the photographer’s experience and by the desire to find in “elsewhere” another way of being oneself (Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare, 1887).

Fannie Escoulen

Curators: Fannie Escoulen, Laure Augustins
Exhibition co-produced by Les Rencontres d’Arles and Fnac, in collaboration with the Nicéphore Niépce Museum, Chalon-sur-Saône.
Publication: Our Distant Dreams. Perspectives on the Fnac Photographic Collection around a Narrative by Nathacha Appanah, Gallimard, 2026.