After returning home from Amsterdam, I found myself wanting more time to create. So I gave myself a week in Arles, a 2,500-year-old city in the south of France, for a creative retreat - wandering its ancient streets with my new Fuji X100VI and no real agenda beyond seeing what caught my eye. It was during one of those wanders that I came across Guillaume, and I almost walked past him.
His camera looked more like an old wooden trunk than a piece of photographic equipment. Sitting on top was a tiny hourglass. Curious, I stepped closer and watched him work - unhurried, focused, set up in a spot where the light spilled perfectly across the old stone buildings behind him.
He explained that he had built the camera himself. He mixes his own chemistry, times every exposure by that hourglass, and develops each print by hand, one at a time. There was no rush in anything he did. My wife and I decided we had to sit for a portrait ourselves.
There was no rapid burst of frames, no LCD screen to review, no "Let's try one more" - just one photograph. The exposure took several seconds, the hourglass quietly measuring the time while we stood perfectly still, a reminder that making a portrait once required patience from both the photographer and the subject.
Then the real magic began. Guillaume disappeared behind his camera to develop the image by hand. The first thing to emerge wasn't the finished portrait - it was a paper negative. Once ready, he placed it on the front of the camera and photographed it again, turning it into a positive print on another sheet of paper. I watched his hands the whole time - steady, practiced, never rushed. In a world where nearly everyone carries a phone capable of taking thousands of photographs a day, people were willingly waiting twenty minutes for a single print, and Guillaume never once seemed to feel that pressure.
Before we left, I turned my own camera on him. It felt only fair - he had just spent twenty minutes making a portrait of us, and I wanted one of him: a craftsman standing beside the camera he'd built with his own hands, doing the work he loves in the middle of that ancient town.
As a portrait photographer, I spend a great deal of time on lighting, expression, and composition. Guillaume approaches the craft differently, but the philosophy feels remarkably familiar - neither of us is chasing the fastest photograph. We're trying to create one that's worth keeping.
The print he gave us wasn't technically perfect. It wasn't razor sharp, and it certainly wasn't flawless. But it was unmistakably human - you could see the hands that built the camera, mixed the chemistry, and made the print.
Looking at it now, I don't just remember Guillaume. I remember the experience - sitting quietly for an exposure, watching another photographer work, and walking away with a handcrafted portrait in the middle of a 2,500-year-old town. Sometimes the photographs we treasure most are the ones that remind us of the people we met along the way.
