Grégoire Eloy, photographer and member of the Tendance Floue collective, is the second former winner of the Bourse du Talent program, invited by PICTO for this unique encounter with the laboratory.
On the occasion of an overnight stay in the lab, Grégoire Eloy transforms the creative space into a site of nocturnal exploration, becoming the protagonist of an immersive artistic experiment. Using photographic equipment provided by MPB—including a Canon body and Fujifilm GF lenses—he navigates the darkness of the lab, moving between shadow and light, from negative to positive, in a sensory encounter with the materials and atmospheres of the darkroom.
From white to black and through to the safelight red, Eloy breathes life into the very lungs of a space where images are crafted and imaginations take form. Carrying a roll of silver gelatin paper on his back, the photographer wanders through the lab, integrating the paper into the setting, exposing it to flash, and then developing the images on site – only to rephotograph them until the early hours of the morning. This approach reflects Grégoire Eloy’s artistic process, which often reimagines the photographic laboratory as a space for immersive and poetic creation.
In his Omalo series, shot in Georgia, he installed silver paper directly in the nocturnal landscape, exposing it simultaneously to the light of a flash and to a digitally captured image—a method that generated a dual image: a photogram developed on-site and a digital photograph, offering two interpretations of the same moment.
In La Parcelle, the photographer constructed a cabin in the forest, serving both as a residence and a darkroom, where he produced silver prints in nature using only the light of a red headlamp.
For a photographer so attuned to the experiential dimension of the lab, like Grégoire Eloy, the magic of the darkroom lies in those suspended moments when the image surfaces—an intimate, tactile revelation linking gesture, material, and the chiaroscuro atmosphere of the photographic process.
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In 2025, MPB, Europe’s top camera reseller, becomes the main partner of Bourse du Talent, a historic programme to help emerging talent that has been supported by PICTO for 25 years. To mark this occasion and the 75th anniversary of the PICTO laboratories, MPB and Picto Foundation have joined forces to offer three former winners of Bourse du Talent an artistic carte blanche : how to represent today’s historic photo laboratory?
The PICTO x MPB CARTE BLANCHE is a continuation of our ongoing desire to put photographers in touch with the photographic ecosystem and to encourage the essence of their profession, the production of images. The CARTE BLANCHE PICTO x MPB is based on this particular magic, inherent in the photographer’s life. The three selected laureates of the Bourse du Talent, Kamila K Stanley (2023), Grégoire Eloy (2004) and Chloé Jafé (2017), will be immersing themselves in the Ile-de-France sites of the PICTO laboratories to offer us their singular vision of an environment, know-how, men and women at the service of photographers and their projects.
Un programme
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