In 2025, MPB, the largest global platform to buy, sell and trade used photo and video kit, 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.
Trois regards pour mettre en lumière cet espace particulier et bien vivant du laboratoire. Dévisager ses artisans, souligner sa matérialité et ses atmosphères, révéler la présence invisible de tout un pan de l’histoire de la photographie, une entreprise confiée à ces trois regards qui nous séduit beaucoup chez PICTO. La CARTE BLANCHE PICTO x MPB, c’est une commande autour de laquelle il est déjà formidable de sentir dès à présent dans la démarche préparatoire de chacun et chacune à quel point l’univers du laboratoire, et peut-être celui de PICTO en particulier, éveille l’attention et la curiosité.
Kamila, Grégoire and Chloé were able to talk to the MPB teams to choose the technical kits best suited to their projects, including shooting and lighting equipment. This support, in the form of loans, enables photographers to test new tools and then benefit from visibility when they show their work. MPB currently supports a number of photography programmes in Europe.
Producing is good, showing is essential! The presentation of the three cartes blanches will take several forms over the course of the festival. Firstly, the three photographers will be invited to present their images and talk about their experiences as part of PICTO’s presence at the Rencontres d’Arles.
To be continued…
Kamila K Stanley
Kamila K Stanley is a British-Polish photographer who has lived in France since childhood. Born into a multilingual immigrant family, she developed a fascination for language and exchange at an early age. With a degree in Latin American Studies, she has worked in a variety of professions in different countries. At the same time, she taught herself photography as she travelled. She has now been a professional photographer for six years. She is represented by Kominek Gallery in Berlin, and by two agencies: BIRTH in Paris and Making Pictures in London.
Kamila K Stanley is developing a new style of photography that moves away from traditional photojournalism. She sees documentary reporting as a creative and collaborative approach, in which her subjects play an active part in the conception of their image.
Grégoire Eloy
Grégoire Eloy was born in 1971 and lives in Paris. He has been a documentary photographer since 2003. For 10 years, he photographed the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, following in the footsteps of the Soviet legacy and the forgotten conflicts of the South Caucasus. From 2010, he collaborated with the scientific community on a trilogy on the science of matter, which became the subject of a series of monographic books including A Black Matter (Journal, 2012), The Fault (RVB Books, 2017), Ossoue (Filigranes, 2021), Aster 1&2 (RVB Books, 2022 and 2023).
Since 2015, he has been exploring our relationship with the environment and the wild during immersive residencies in natural environments: the island of Guernsey (2016-18), the Georgian Caucasus (2018-20), the forest of Perche (2020-22), the glaciers of the Pyrenees (2021), the foreshore of Finistère (2021-23). In 2022 and 2023 he will be taking part in the Ministry of Culture’s Grande Commande Photographique, led by the BNF, with Le Beau Geste, a project on citizen involvement with exiles in the French Alps. Grégoire has been a member of the Tendance Floue collective since 2016. He is a winner of the Bourse du Talent (2004) and the Prix Niépce Gens d’Images (2021).
Chloé Jafé
Chloé Jafé, born in Lyon in 1984, is an artist and photographer who trained at the École de Condé in Lyon and the UAL Central Saint Martins School in London. After graduating, she worked in the London office of Magnum Photos before moving to Tokyo. Over the years, these experiences have enabled her to develop a style that is both visual and documentary, and viscerally personal. Attracted by sensitive, difficult and often marginal subjects, Chloé Jafé never hesitates to push back the boundaries of the photographic medium by working directly on the prints, using acrylics and brushes. Each of her series has given rise to a limited edition book, bound and handmade by the artist.
From her 7-year immersion in Japan (2013-2019), Chloé Jafé has brought back images in steely black and white, moist and harsh, tender and ferocious, revealing an unprecedented vision of an opaque country. His trilogy, comprising the chapters I give you my life, Okinawa mon Amour and How I met Jiro, highlights the little-known and subversive aspects of an archipelago where modesty is de rigueur. Her critically acclaimed report on Yakuza women was awarded the Bourse du Talent in 2017.
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