Every year, the Rencontres d’Arles and the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie team up to promote young photographers, exhibiting work by three of the school’s graduates as part of the festival’s official program. This year, Anna Planas, founder and co-director of the Temple gallery, and Sam Stourdzé, director of the Rencontres d’Arles, have invited Apolline Lamoril, Lexane Laplace and Yannick Délen, echoing this year’s “Latina!” and “Experiencing Territory” themes.

The series presented by Apolline Lamoril, Martine de Bandol, takes as its starting point the discovery of a young woman’s lifeless body after she overdosed on heroin in the ladies’ room of a casino in Bandol, a small town on the French Riviera, in the summer of 1969. Beginning with period press pictures, Ms. Lamoril builds a photographic narrative that takes her from the Odyssey to a Romantic period painting and small islands off the coast of Bandol. A subtle juxtaposition of documents featuring formal and thematic analogies suggests links between images and texts.

Echoing this year’s Latin American theme, Lexane Laplace offers a poetic documentary vision of Guyana, a neglected, poorly known French territory where she spent part of her childhood. She recently returned there in order to confront the fictional relationship she has always had with Guyana. Echoing the news, she builds a narrative at once real and fictional, documented and imagined, by contrasting different relationships to the image, from manipulating negatives to re-using family archives, shooting pictures and investigating in the field.

Commercial, industrial and residential zoning has become the urban planner’s main space management tool. Following the model of compartmentalizing space according to function, Yannick Délen’s work involves a utopian vision of the city ruled by short-term economic logic. Based on many collective works, including the New Topographics, Landscape Observatory and DATAR exhibitions, he offers observations on various scales, oscillating between abstraction and a desire for objectivity, and integrates a sensitive approach to the cityscape.