Advanced Photo System

Lucas Leffler’s work is stimulated by a fascination for the materiality of chemistry and its dual nature close to alchemy, between the scien- tific and magical dimension. He has an experimental practice of the photographic medium that he tends to expand to other forms such as sculpture or installation. Lucas Leffler proposes another narrative through his silver prints with mud or his experiments with silver nitrate inspired by the research of Lilly Kolisko and August Strindberg. He re-evaluates history by integrating into his work the myths and rituals of the places he invests, as well as the study and experimentation of materials.

APS (for Advanced Photo System) is an ongoing project about the techno-industrial transition in the photo- graphic industry in the 2000s. It depicts the decline of the film company Kodak and its attempts to maintain a dominant position in a rapidly digitizing market. The project focuses on the year 2007 marked by the release of the first iPhone launched by Apple and followed a few months later by the industrial collapse of Kodak. APS gathers visual archives of Kodak and amateur images from YouTube videos describing the destruction of the company’s buildings, then printed on old smartphones. From then on, Leffler invents actual relics of a techno- logy that has become archaic.

Lucas Leffler is a 2019 graduate of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium. His work is being in- cluded in a first publication Zilverbeek (Silver Creek) in the fall of 2019. It has been exhibited at FOMU (Antwerp, BE) as part of the .tiff exhibition, at the Musée de l’Élysée (Lausanne, CH) as well as for the five-year exhibition reGeneration4. Leffler is the laureate of several awards, including the Liège Photobook Dummy Award and the ManifestO photo festival in Toulouse. In France, Lucas Leffler is represented by the Galerie Intervalle.

PICTO LAB Residency [fr]

Lucas Leffler developed the APS project as part of the PICTO LAB/ EXPÉRIMENTER L’IMAGE residency program offered by the Picto Foundation, in collaboration with the PICTO laboratories and produc- tion workshops. As partners in the project, the Foundation, and more particularly the PICTO LAB program, gives artists the opportunity to test techniques and protocols and to use them in unexpected ways to go beyond or explore new possible fields of the image and its formal rendering. Picto Foundation brings together artists and network actors, notably La Fab–fonds de dotation agnès b. , the Réseau Diagonal, the Cité internationale des arts, and the Dream Big and Grow Fast Foundation.

pictofoundation.fr