Together with Leco, Modernage Photographic Service, JJP Copy-Art, Spiratone and Photo Service Suppliers, Pavelle was part of a network of photofinishing suppliers founded by émigrés in New York that acted as a contact hub for émigré and American photographers, photo agencies (Black Star, PIX, Camera Features, Three Lions, Rapho Guillmette, European Picture Service, ect.) and magazines. Especially from the end of the 1930s many photographers preferred to use a professional photofinisher rather than have their own darkroom. The high demand for images from magazines and newspapers also established the need for these photofinishing laboratories. In the 1940s, Leuben Pavelle, another member of the Pavelle family, married the German émigré Ralph Baum, with whom she founded the Modernage wedding studio, transformed in 1944 into the Modernage Photographic Service, a photographic processing studio and laboratory.

Leo Pavelle was born in 1907 in Dvinsk (Latvia) and emigrated in 1920 to New York, starting his career as an engineer. After starting to photograph with a Leica camera he had brought with him to New York, he recognised that the photofinishing labs in New York had no experience of developing images taken with this German miniature camera. By studying camera instruction books and photo magazines and through his wife, whose family had a photofinishing laboratory, he gained some experience and conducted darkroom experiments into developing and enlarging processes. In 1933 Zeiss introduced the Contax miniature camera to America and Pavelle was commissioned to take pictures with it to demonstrate the advantages of its small size and fast exposure. He spent several days photographing animals at the Bronx Zoo, as his émigré colleagues Ylla, Lotte Jacobi and Lilo Hess would also do in the 1940s.

In July 1934 Leo and Carmen Pavelle, together with Leo's brother, opened a store in the U.S. headquarters of Zeiss in New York. In 1936 they moved to 16 East 42nd Street and set up a photofinishing laboratory for black and white film. Responding to the rising demand for images during the 1940s, Pavelle created the first automatic enlargement process. In addition to his offices on 16 West 42nd Street, Pavelle also had, from 1938, a separate location, at 533 West 57th Street, where the machines and big tanks for the photofinishing process were housed. Both office and laboratory feature in a photo series by Wurts Bros, currently in the digital collection of the Museum of the City of New York.

During the 1940s, the German émigré Marion Palfi's first job was at Pavelle Laboratories. Besides the mechanisation of the photofinishing process, Pavelle was also involved in the creation and evolution of colour film. In March 1944, the firm Ansco introduced Printon, a material on which positive-transparency colour film could be printed. Ansco Printon colour transparency printing machines, along with a colour-processing machine for the subsequent steps in the developing tanks, washers and dryers, were developed. From 1945 the newly founded Pavelle Color Inc. branch became the first independent photofinisher for colour film distributed developer and equipment for developing colour photographs. In 1951 Pavelle had 175 employees and turned out more than 20,000 colour prints a day.
From the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, these chemical processes made it possible for the first time to develop and produce colour photographs without the need for huge laboratories, a boon for private individuals, amateur photographers and freelancers. In 1962 the Pavelle Color Printer p-100 was introduced, an automatic daylight colour printer-processor that turned out colour prints in three minutes (The Record, 9 March 1962, p.89). In 1969 Pavelle Corporation opened a production plant in West Caldwell for the manufacture of rapid-access photographic colour-print paper (Anonymous 1969, 26).
No exact dates are known or whether the cooperation still exists today or if it was bought by another company. However, we do know that Leo Pavelle's grandson runs a homepage under the name Pavelle Photo and is himself a photographer.