If you are here in Arles for Les Rencontres (The Meetings, in English), the place for doing business is the terrace at l'Hotel Nord-Pinus, which serves as an open air cafe/restaurant/office at the east end of Place du Forum. If you can stay at this hotel even better but bookings are closed a year in advance. Worse still - there are few rooms and the cache of putting up famous matadors when they come to town for the bullfights further narrows your chances.

Particular to Arles is the number of exhibitions that are on view in churches that date back as far as the 15th century. Among them is a show on Mick Jagger, which is curated by Francois Hebel, the festival director. The exhibition consists of roughly 54 portraits starting from his early days and includes images by photographers such as Cecil Beaton, Andy Warhol, Gerard Mankovitz, Jim Marshall and Annie Lebovitz and it's on at the Chapelle des Trinitaires, a 17th century chapel on rue de la Republic.

Left to right: Leon Ferarri installation at l’Eglise Sainte-Anne; Mick Jagger portraits at la Chapelle des Trinitaires; Leon Ferrari, La civilizacion occidental y cristiana (1965). Photos: Tom Wool.

Another show called A Journey Through Photography is installed in a maze-like labyrinth and features the collection of French cinematographer Marin Karmitz. This exhibition belongs to The Changeover Trail and is up in l'Eglise des Freres Precheurs, just behind Les Rencontres headquarters on rue du Docteur Fanton.

Less appropriately, or perhaps more, depending on how you look at it, is the exhibition by guest of honor Leon Ferrari, which is his first retrospective in France. Ferrari, who won the golden lion at Venice's Biennale and had an exhibition up at MoMA recently is not strictly a photographer but uses photography, collage and sculpture to deal with subjects such as religion and political repression. A mammoth crucifix in which Christ is nailed to an F111 fighter plane model hangs above a space where the altar would normally be at l'Eglise Sainte-Anne, a 16th century church in Place de la Republic. Ferrari's work forms part of The Argentina Trail, which includes works by fellow Argentinians Augusto Ferrari, on display at the beautiful Cloitre Saint-Trophime and by Marcos Adandia, Leandro Berra, Gabriel Valansi, Marcos Lopez and Sebastiano Mauri, all on view at the Park des Ateliers.

On Wednesday night I went down to the Park des Atelier at 1:00 am after taking in a screening of images by contemporary Russian photographers at the Theatre Antique, a Roman amphitheater. The place was hopping, with a DJ spinning records through the not so early hours of Thursday morning.

One of the last shows that I took in was Shoot! Existential Photography, which is on The Film Photography Trail. A very tongue-in-cheek-show featuring photography from penny arcades where the shooter, on hitting a bull's-eye, would take a picture of himself shooting. There are images of celebrities in the act and also by an elderly lady who has been visiting one of these arcades every year since the 1940s and has pictures from every visit to prove it. At the end of the show there is a shooting range equipped with camera where you are invited to shoot yourself, which, of course, I did.

Les Rencontres d'Arles opening week, with festival events and workshops, continues through July 13; the 60 exhibitions on view continue through September 19th 2010.

Tom Wool is a New York based photographer whose work from the Rombuk Valley in Tibet continues through July 26th at the Rubin Museum of Art.

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