As part of the Bicentennial of Photography, the Drawing Lab—a laboratory dedicated to experimentation and the promotion of contemporary drawing—is presenting a group exhibition that highlights the connections between photography and drawing.

While Nicéphore Niépce invented photography in 1826, his contemporary Henry Fox Talbot also believed he had discovered, in photography, a “faithful pencil” capable of naturally capturing the interplay of light and shadow. He also referred to photograms—light-sensitive prints obtained by direct contact—as “photogenic drawings,” marking the early stages of photography as a process of fixing and momentarily obscuring light.

While photography is now recognized as one of the major artistic media, this group exhibition aims to highlight the close dialogue it maintains with contemporary drawing, in all its forms, and to show how drawing has evolved and reinvented itself in unique ways in the shadow of this two-century-old invention.

In an era when photography and post-photography are the source of most images, some artists maintain a disconcerting closeness to these source images, going so far as to create exact replicas or the most faithful translations. In this way, they create drawings of incredible photogenic quality, raising doubts as to whether they are graphic or photographic in nature. But why “waste” so much time redrawing a snapshot? The transfer of the photographic image into a drawing is, above all, a process of revelation: the document becomes a true canvas for exploration—to be scrutinized, delved into deeply, and “transmuted,” according to Jean Olivier Hucleux. While the artist tends to fade into the background during the process of recreating the image, he reveals and intensifies the photographic elements—details, grain, texture, surface, materiality, fragility—all while imbuing the image with a new sense of duration and tactility. Through a historic work by Jean Olivier Hucleux and other more recent works (Daphné Nan Le Sergent, Mireille Blanc, Éric Manigaud, Célia Muller), the exhibition aims to make this “graphic transformation of the image” tangible, to borrow Jean-Christophe Bailly’s expression regarding the transition to drawing.

The photographic image can also fade away through various processes of graphic transposition: blurring (Léa Belooussovitch), “blind” transcription, superimposition, association, or confrontation (Fabienne Ballandras). These visual shifts give rise to new focal points and focal lengths, perceptual distortions—to the point of illegibility or abstraction—and open up critical perspectives based on photographic images, particularly those from the media— “shock photos” from photojournalism, as well as photo captions. Drawing thus endows them with new materialities, visibilities, and temporalities.

Furthermore, by presenting complex photographic works—such as Nicolas Daubanes’s incandescent photograms , an interactive installation by Jérémie Setton in which the viewer reveals the image in two stages, and Pascal Navarro’s photosensitive works that gradually come into view— the exhibition uses drawing to explore the founding principles of photography: latent image, development, fixation, reproducibility, negative/positive reversibility, photosensitization, and imprint. Through these experimental works, drawing itself becomes photographic.

Historical pieces, iconic and experimental works, new creations, and installations revived for the Drawing Lab will thus form a journey through works that echo one another, organized around three themes — “Becoming Graffiti,” “Focus ,” and “Latent Image.” In the exhibition *Eclipse*, drawing is thus revealed through the lens of photography.

Anne Favier, Exhibition curator