Hugo Chazot-Ranquet (b. 1993, French Alps) is a photographer working with analog processes and darkroom printing. He lives and works between France and India.

Trained as a research engineer, he spent several years working in leading research centres before leaving to work with photography full time. The decision came from the darkroom, where he had been printing since adolescence, and where the image stopped being a record and became something built by hand.

His practice centres on the silver gelatin print, made by hand, by contact, on Ilford paper, through light, chemistry and time. From this discipline a visual language emerged: grain as structure, the figure dissolved into form, the print as the only finished state of the image.

His current work, Mackie Lines, applies this language to the human figure in the studio. The body is held at the threshold where it becomes a shape. Veiled, refracted, anonymous, it surfaces and withdraws at once.

His earlier series, Human Trajectories, is ten years of street photography on analog film, printed in the darkroom and shown as silver gelatin prints.

Selected exhibitions

2024. Solo exhibition, Galerie L'Étranger, Grenoble, one month.
2023. Group exhibition, Click Gallery, selected among top 10 out of 600 entries.
2022. Three pop-up exhibitions, Lyon and Grenoble.

Open to gallery representation and institutional projects.

Contact

For exhibitions, print inquiries, commissions or press, write to contact@hugochazotranquet.com.

Artist statement

I photograph the moment a body becomes a shape.

I worked as a research engineer before I worked as a photographer. The method stayed: test, fail, isolate what matters, repeat it until it holds. My laboratory is a darkroom in France.

For three years I chased an unstable effect. Light turns against itself during development and the edges of things begin to dissolve. The chemistry kept showing me the image and refusing to repeat it. I worked until I could make it mine.

I print by hand, on silver gelatin paper. The print is the work. Each one carries the session that made it: the chemistry, the exposure, the hand.

The figures are veiled, refracted, anonymous. They arrive and withdraw at once. I want you to stand at that threshold and stay.

Explore The Grain Project, the series Mackie Lines and Human Trajectories, or Commercial work.