The Guardian's review of this year's Arles photography festival carries a provocative headline: "Who needs big names when you've got cute animals and alien abductions?" The question is only half-facetious. It signals that the annual Rencontres d'Arles, long a fixture of the European photography calendar, has assembled a 2024 edition in which celebrity photographers take a back seat to subject matter that is stranger, softer and — on the reviewer's evidence — more disarming.

That framing matters institutionally. Arles has historically anchored its prestige in monographic blockbusters devoted to canonical figures, drawing curators, collectors and dealers into the Provençal town each summer. A review that leads with otters and extraterrestrials, rather than a household name, tells us the festival's centre of gravity has shifted — or at least that its most memorable rooms this year belong to unexpected material.

The Guardian's title points to two distinct thematic currents running through the programme. The first is wildlife — or, more precisely, the appeal of animals as photographic subjects, with all the warmth and anthropomorphic pull that implies. The second is the alien: work engaging with abduction narratives, unidentified objects and the visual culture of the paranormal. Set side by side, these strands suggest a festival interested in how photography handles belief and emotion — how a lens can make us trust, fear or melt at what it shows, whether the subject is a creature with fur or a close encounter.

It is worth pausing on what that pairing does to the experience of looking. Cute animals operate on viewers almost involuntarily; they bypass critical faculties and go straight for affection. Alien-abduction imagery works the opposite nerve, trading in dread, hoax and the frisson of the unverified. A festival that programs both, and does so successfully enough for a national critic to headline with them, is arguably testing photography's oldest claim: that the camera is an engine of credulity, as ready to manufacture conspiracy as communion. The review's rhetorical question — who needs big names? — doubles as a claim about authorship itself. Perhaps the subject, not the signature, is doing the persuasive work this summer.

The headline's tone is telling, too. This is not a pan. The phrasing is playful, almost delighted, and it positions the animal and alien material as a genuine pleasure — a discovery that compensates for whatever star power the line-up lacks. Reviewers do not deploy "cute" in a headline about a festival they found hollow. The gamble, implicitly, has paid off.

What remains unresolved in the available account is which specific photographers and venues earned this enthusiasm, and how the town's churches, warehouses and cloisters were pressed into service for a programme so given over to the cuddly and the uncanny. Arles has always been as much an argument about photography's direction as an exhibition; a year that stakes its reputation on otters and abductees rather than marquee names is making that argument in an unusually blunt way.

If the strategy holds — and early critical response suggests it has — the coming editions of the Rencontres may lean further into idiosyncratic, subject-driven programming, proving that the festival's draw lies less in whose name hangs on the wall than in what, and how persuasively, the walls make us see.