Almost a year to the day after the publication of his interview in L’Oeil de la Photographie, we met Philippe Gassmann again. An opportunity to take stock of the past year and to talk to us about the creation of Picto Foundation.
We met a year ago, shortly before the launch of a Picto photo lab in New York. How do you assess this past year? How is it different from the European market? What are you planning next?
It has been a very exciting experience. Our clients are thrilled. Picto New York also offers new opportunities for Picto Paris. We meet the needs of international luxury companies seeking, across different continents, services identical to those we offer in Paris. We have been turning profits from the very first year, which will allow us to set up a range of services dedicated to photographers.
Together with Edouard Beaslay, who runs the US lab, and Julien Alamo, who pioneered the new Picto Online service, we are launching an online printing service in New York in September 2016. We think that professional photographers have been waiting for a service like Picto Online, available in France for nearly a decade. And if the experiment is successful, we will take this concept to other countries in Europe.
You have launched the new version of Picto Online on June 1, 2016. Is it as successful as you expected?
The Picto Online platform aims at optimizing the needs of current users and offer access to quality online printing to a larger number of photographers.
On the first point, the results have been very encouraging! I love sharing the testimony of the photographer Emeric Lhuisset who sees the new version of Picto Online as more complete and user-friendly for those have not yet mastered all the available options, as well as the feedback of Franck Seguin, editor-in-chief of Photo de Ciel et Espace, who, in turn, appreciates the streamlined two-step ordering process (previously involving seven steps).
As to your second question, we wanted to update our design and make it even more user-friendly, introduce the drag-and-drop feature to facilitate file upload, redefine the categories of services on offer and introduce pictograms and illustrations for comparison, offer preview mode for framing options—in short, give the site a significant facelift, which took us three years to accomplish… I believe that the outcome lives up to our expectations and meets the needs of photographers who were already Picto Online customers as well as those of new users.
Could you tell us about the January takeover?
We are very happy about this synergy of sensibilities and know-how as much as about the team in place. We have re-invested in the latest materials, and I am very pleased with the continued quality and volume of activity. The teams complement those of Picto, which allows us to better respond to market demands, in terms of both the size of photographers’ orders and projects and the diversity of services required by a luxury industry.
Throughout the year, we have seen Picto sponsor numerous events: exhibitions, festivals, as well as support photography schools… Could you tell us a little about your involvement with the schools?
Picto has always supported the mission of an incubator of photography professionals and of a knowledge broker. That’s how a great number of photo lab professionals, printers and retouchers, cut their teeth at Picto. And, as is often the case in crafts, knowledge is transmitted from one generation to the next. This is what Payram is doing at Picto by offering training in order to share and, in fact, extend his exceptional experience as a fine art black-and-white photo printer.
This “pedagogic” ambition also involves supporting younger generations of photographers. We are committed to disseminating knowledge in photography and visual arts schools. Thanks to partnerships with over 30 institutions, students and teachers can gain access to learning tools impossible to acquire, manage, and maintenance in most schools, namely imaging equipment. Our goal is to help young generations develop professional photo lab skills by offering them, via Picto Online, quality affordable solutions adapted to their needs. In addition to significant price reductions, students can take advantage of personalized workspace on our professional printing website and develop their practice with great autonomy.
For the past twenty years, Picto has also supported younger generations through prizes, established or supported by the lab, which have long been recognized as professional network-building and a springboard for new talent. These prizes include the Emerging Talent Award (Bourse du Talent) and the Picto Young Fashion Photography Prize (Prix Picto de la Jeune Photographie de Mode).
What are your projects at Arles this year? Which exhibitions have you sponsored? What are your criteria in terms of offering support to photographers?
In his second year as the head of the Rencontres d’Arles, Sam Stourdzé has created a program comprising 40 exhibitions in several thematic categories, which naturally called for as many diverse services on our part. Contributing over time to a festival such as the Rencontres, across a number of exhibitions, allows us to involve our fine arts specialists in a given project from A to Z, and to be fully engaged and committed.
From a technical point of view, the experience is also interesting. Depending on the needs of the photographer, the approach of the curator in charge of the exhibition, the subject matter, or the constraints of the exhibition space, we must be able to meet the demands with utmost precision. This year Picto has produced large format silver gelatin prints as well as pigment ink prints and blue latex prints. These are exciting challenges for our teams!
For this edition of the festival, Picto has collaborated with the Rencontres on nearly ten exhibitions. It’s difficult to talk about preferences… What appeals to me is the photographic diversity we are invited to explore. Being present at the Discovery Award presented to Beni Bischof by Stefano Stoll is just as fascinating to me as following the remnants of the Maginot Line with Alexandre Guirkinger. You have to come to Arles to appreciate the images…, then it’s up to you to find what strikes your fancy!
Why have you created an endowment fund? What will be its mission? Who is its beneficiary?
The establishment of the Picto Foundation is a natural development in the photo lab’s sixty-five-year-long history. Since it was first founded by my grandfather, Pierre Gassmann, each successive generation adapted and developed its activity while upholding the values of innovation and sharing. And so Picto’s involvement in the advances and experiments of photography does not date back to yesterday. Numerous projects have been launched since the 1950s, first to come to the aid of Magnum Photos, then to back up pioneering photography awards, such as the Bourse du Talent. Then new opportunities arose to support photographers.
Our task today, however, is to muster our energies and perpetuate our activity at a time when photographers need our presence more than ever. It was in this spirit that I advocated the creation of the Picto Foundation. Its structure, implemented by Vincent Marcilhacy, will bring together long-term projects to be supported by the Picto lab: historical projects we wish to maintain, original proposals we wish to encourage, and more personal initiatives we wish to develop.
We are thus preparing an agenda capable of meeting the chief expectations we anticipate on the part of photographers: promoting, sharing, and preserving photography. Each of these missions is extremely important to us, as these goals are the lifeblood of our company.
Picto needs photographers, and what better way of finding them than to foster their emergence? Promoting photography means, for us, offering photographers stimulus to create their series and photo stories and supporting their careers in the world of photography. While the Picto Young Fashion Photography Award and the Emerging Talent Award actively contribute to that goal, we have decided to complement our support to photographers by sponsoring the Niépce Prize—a sponsorship that will be funded in an unusual way, something we will have occasion to discuss at a later time.
Aware of the difficulties photographers face in distributing their work, a large part of the Picto Foundation’s agenda will be Sharing photography. This will involve long-term collaboration with photographers, venues, and events in planning their programming. Most notably, the Picto Foundation will extend continued support to Le Bal in Paris as well as contribute to the energy of the Promenades Photographiques de Vendôme, and so on. We will sponsor other projects, such as the Fisheye Gallery, an initiative of the Fisheye Magazine, which impressed us with its similarly ambitious dedication to emerging artists.
Lastly, an objective that alone could orient the Picto Foundation, namely Preserving photography: For half a century, Picto has been a hub for artisans who print our images, on various types of paper as well as on rigid materials, striving to best anticipate photographers’ needs and assimilate the latest technological advances. We return here to the role of knowledge broker I spoke of earlier. Preserving photography means ensuring the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next, from one age to another, from traditional techniques to high-tech processes. This is an ambition, which in the case of the Picto Foundation will consist in building a photography collection, primarily devoted to emerging talents, and involve supporting photography-oriented curricula at photography and visual arts schools and developing a sustained dialog between traditional know-how and state-of-the-art technologies.
The Picto Foundation came into existence precisely in the context of those aspirations and objectives; it is an initiative, which, I hope, will provide continued support to photographic professions and to photographers and open new promising perspectives.
INFORMATION
Laboratoire Picto
53bis, rue de la Roquette
75011 Paris
France
http://www.picto.fr
https://www.pictoonline.fr
