Paris Photo 2026
Booth D 19, Main Section
After six years of collaboration with the Intervalle Gallery, which believed in his work from the very beginning, Lucas Leffler presents his first solo show in the main section of Paris Photo. His works are included in the collections of the Museum of Photography in Antwerp, the Musée de l’Élysée in Lausanne, the New York Public Library, as well as the Carrefour des Arts and Boghossian Foundations in Brussels.
Fascinated by the alchemy of film development and a connoisseur of the industrial history of photography, Lucas Leffler explores the conflictual coexistence between film and digital technologies. Trained at the Ilya Prigogine University and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, he reinvents photographic processes that restore the image’s lost materiality, creating works using hybrid techniques that are often impossible to reproduce exactly. Swimming against the tide of an era saturated with ephemeral images, he offers Kodak a spectacular comeback.
IMPLOSION
On June 29, 2007, the iPhone made its debut. The next day, the demolition of the Kodak factories in Rochester began, rewriting history: digital triumphed, film collapsed.
These works reassemble, on a grid of 168 iPhone screens, an image extracted from amateur videos of the implosions. In the darkroom, Lucas Leffler prints screen by screen using wet collodion on glass—the oldest film-based technique. A UV flash fixative seals the work.
A radical paradox: the iPhone becomes both a light-sensitive surface and a technological tomb. Digital technology preserves the trace of the analog. Two hundred years after its invention, film photography is still alive.
REVO
In 2000, Kodak proclaimed its transition to digital with the slogan “What a nice day for a revolution!” In 2007, its historic factories were demolished by implosion. Workers filmed and posted these images of destruction online.
Nearly twenty years later, Lucas Leffler brings them back to life. He copies these archives and returns them to physical form, to a lasting trace. By choosing the wet collodion process—a technique dating back to the birth of photography in the 19th century—he acts as an alchemist, transforming ephemeral pixels into indelible imprints. The destroyed factory is reborn as a silvery ghost. Photography is reborn, not in spite of its foretold death, but because of it.
BLEACHED MOMENT
“Click-clack, thank you.” That’s how Kodak invited us in 1967 to freeze moments for eternity. But memory doesn’t work that way.
Drawing on unprecedented access to the Kodak collection at the Nicéphore Niépce Museum, Lucas Leffler explores color negatives: industrial images, factory scenes, and advertisements from the 1960s. He crops them, prints them as Kodak chromogenic prints, and then alters them. The colors soften, and certain textures take on a patina. Each modification makes the image unique, just as every memory is. Bleached Moment challenges our own reconstructions of the past, where imperfection becomes authenticity.
