Meet Cami

I was practically born on a plane. Film by Cami is what happens when someone who has never quite known where home is starts carrying pieces of the world back on rolls of film.

Hi, I'm Camille, but most people call me Cami. I'm a French photographer and interior architect, and every print in this shop started as a frame of analog film I shot myself, somewhere I lived, loved or kept coming back to.

A childhood between continents

I took my first flight at two months old, to Morocco, where we lived for three years. Then came a short stop in France, and four years in New Caledonia. That's where my best memories are, and where I got what I call my tropical soul. We visited Tahiti, Australia and New Zealand along the way. Then it was back to Morocco for three more years.

When we moved back to France for good, I was 13. Everyone around me had grown up in the same town, with the same friends and the same streets. I had grown up everywhere. I felt like the odd one out, a stranger in my own country, and from that day on I had one goal: to leave again.

A box of 2,000 slides

For as long as I can remember, I've been drawn to photography. But the day it all clicked, I was sitting on the floor of my family home in front of a huge box I'd never opened.

Inside were more than 2,000 slides. My grandfather took them in the 1960s and 70s while travelling the world, often to the most unexpected places: Ethiopia, Yemen, Djibouti, Madagascar, Tahiti. I never met him. He passed away before I was born. But holding his slides up to the light, one by one, I felt like we were finally meeting.

I chose about a hundred to scan, so they wouldn't fade away, and picked up a film camera of my own. Every roll since feels like a small way of continuing the journey he began.

Where is home?

Years later, I wrote my master's thesis in interior architecture about exactly that question. I called it Loin de, "far from": far from home, from your roots, from everything familiar. I interviewed people who had moved across the world and asked them where home was. The one person I couldn't interview was my grandfather, so his slides spoke for him.

The image I keep coming back to is a potted plant. It has real roots, but they move with it. As long as it has what it needs, it keeps growing.

The answer I found was simple: home isn't really the walls. It's what we bring inside them, the pieces of somewhere else that make a new place feel familiar.

On the road, with a film camera

As soon as I graduated, I found an internship in Costa Rica, and I haven't really stopped moving since. A year between Central America and Mexico, then a few years based in Lisbon, with long detours to Egypt, Colombia, Brazil and beyond. More than 25 countries so far: the White Desert and the Nile, the beaches of Rio, the cliffs of the Portuguese coast, the calanques of Provence.

Today I'm back in France, in the Auvergne countryside, which is where my latest winter series was shot. Turns out home can surprise you too.

Why film

A roll of film gives you a limited number of frames, no screen to check, and no second chance. It makes me slow down, look longer, and only press the shutter when a place really asks for it. What comes back has a warmth, a grain and a softness of colour I've never managed to get any other way.

Each roll is developed and scanned in high resolution to keep that character intact. The photograph is analog; the print is a museum-quality fine art giclée, made with archival pigment inks on heavyweight matte paper, so the texture of film carries all the way to your wall.

From my camera to your walls

Because I'm also an interior architect, I think about a photograph the way I think about a room: the light, the materials, the mood it brings into a space. I choose and edit every image with a real wall in mind.

Every print is made to order just for you, available unframed or framed in real wood. I'm still the one behind every step, from choosing the frame on the roll to answering your emails.

And the story isn't finished. Rolls from Colombia, Mexico and Costa Rica are still waiting to join the shop.