Curated by Anthony Vaccarello, an exhibition at Saint Laurent Babylone in Paris brings into focus the work of French photographer Hugo Mapelli, whose experimental practice stands as a poetic homage to the technical richness of the photographic medium.
Hugo Mapelli belongs to a generation of photographers whose visual language is rooted in a sensitive and instinctive approach. In 2019, after assisting several major figures in fashion photography, including the late Peter Lindbergh, he embarked on his own path. Without formal academic training, he chose instead to approach photography through immersion in its history, beginning with its earliest processes. Calotypes, cyanotypes, and photograms form a visual goldmine that he appropriates with a distinctly contemporary eye.
More than technical formulas, it is the gestures of early photographers that fascinate him. He reflects on how these gestures might be performed again today. In the darkroom he built for himself, he diverts contemporary tools, including digital screens, to produce analogue images. In one of them, the discreet grid of pixels surfaces across an interlacing of hands. At a time when film appears, in his view, to be under threat, the photographer seeks to reactivate the very idea of analogue photography.
A photogram of vegetal imprints made using the Lumen process, which requires highly specific conditions of light and humidity, attests to the rigor he pursues. Yet although he draws from early publications to uncover the pioneers’ technical secrets, he never follows them to the letter. In his darkroom, Mapelli disrupts, experiments, and embraces the accident. Chance and error become catalysts for creation.
From these engagements with light, chemistry, and pigments emerge worlds in which color unfolds in plural palettes or in subtle monochromatic harmonies. Some are figurative, others abstract, some organic, others geometric. All are bound by a constant: a dense poetry suffused with sensuality. This sensuality resides as much in the subject and its treatment as in the materiality of the image itself, in its palpable haptic qualities. Could such an experience be felt on a screen? Hardly. For Hugo Mapelli, “a photographic image is made for paper,” whether the glossy surface of a print or the more fragile pages of a fanzine. The one he conceived with Anthony Vaccarello alongside the exhibition extends this exploration. There, colors vibrate differently and transform in contact with the page, once again allowing space for chance.
By reenacting the foundational gestures of the medium while hybridizing them with contemporary tools, Hugo Mapelli rekindles the spirit of Pictorialism: a photography conceived as matter, as a sensitive surface, and as a space for experimentation.
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