The 57th Rencontres d'Arles unfolds under the theme Des mondes à relire (Worlds to Re-read), an invitation to revisit how photographs construct meaning, memory, and identity. "Read Against the Machine" responds to this framework by reclaiming the slow, unpredictable, fundamentally social act of looking at photographs together.

Increasingly, images are sorted, categorized, shadow-banned, interpreted, and circulated by automated systems before human eyes ever reach them. Algorithms decide what is visible, what is relevant, and what an image "means."

This open call, workshop, and Face-to-Face edition insist on the fact that the most meaningful readings of images happen not through computation but through conversation: when people with different histories, languages, and intuitions sit in front of the same picture and say what they see.

"Read Against the Machine" isn't about refusing the virtual, digital, technological instance now so highly intertwined with the photographic; it's about asserting that collaborative, social intelligence remains an asset to be trained and always re-staged. By choosing to look, think, and talk with one another, we move beyond automated interpretation and return to the unpredictable, essential act of seeing together, ultimately to better understand the limits and potentials of photographic works today.