The PICTO Foundation team is pleased to announce that the jury of the 6th edition of the PICTO LAB / EXPERIMENTING WITH IMAGES residency, which met in March, has selected the project -15,000 by French photographer Frédéric Delangle. His work offers a technical exploration of engraving on photographic prints, centered on the earliest prehistoric portraits created by Magdalenian artists.

Frédéric Delangle’s application is supported by Valérie Cazin of Galerie Binome in Paris.

During his residency, Frédéric will have access to PICTO’s production facilities and benefit from the support of the laboratory teams in developing his project. The outcomes of his residency will be presented at the a ppr oc he fair in November 2026, as well as at Galerie Binome in 2027.

His project for the residency lies at the intersection of photography and anthropology. He focused on the Lussac-les-Châteaux cave, where he observed engraved drawings of human faces dating back to prehistoric times.

“I believe that all photographers are, in some way, anthropologists when they work with the human subject.”

Closed to the public, the Grotte de la Marche has long remained an inaccessible site, fueling both curiosity and imagination. Frédéric Delangle has encountered a remarkable heritage composed of thousands of engraved stones, adorned with animal figures as well as human representations and true portraits. The site’s limited international recognition raises questions for him, given that it is one of the very few caves in the world to contain such an extensive corpus of figurative human imagery.

One possible explanation lies in the very nature of the works themselves: extremely subtle engravings, often nearly invisible to the naked eye, which Frédéric aims to reveal during his residency. In order to bring out their full complexity, the artist has been conducting in-depth photographic research since 2018, multiplying viewpoints and lighting techniques to render the richness of these engravings perceptible.

Photography allows the artist to capture, with precision and completeness, the marks present on each stone, which are then interpreted to reveal their meaningful forms. Engraving, through etching, enables Frédéric Delangle to bring forth the hidden image while preserving both the precision of the line and the traces of hesitation or earlier drawings.

His work is rooted in a rigorous approach at the intersection of photography and printmaking. The residency will provide an opportunity to experiment with merging these two practices, producing prints enriched with engraved lines and developing a sensitive, three-dimensional approach that photography alone cannot achieve.

The technical and artistic support, along with the dialogue with PICTO’s master printers, plays a key role in shaping an outcome that remains as faithful as possible to his intentions.

The jury was made up of :

• Raphaëlle Stopin, curator, director of the Centre photographique Rouen Normandie
• Marie Sepchat, Founder of The(M) éditions
• Eglantine Aubry, Independent Consultant, Project Manager for the Bicentennial of Photography x Métiers d’Art, Secretary of the LUX Network
• Emilia Genuardi, Director of a ppr oc he
• Anna Katharina Scheidegger, photographer and winner 2025
• Sylvie Thieriot, CEO Nielsen Design France
• Eric Levy, Director of rentingArt
• Elliot Moreau, FUJIFILM France
• Chloé Tocabens, Head of PICTO Foundation and La Comète
• Christophe Batifoulier, Printer PICTO

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