Through Polaroids, wet plate collodion portraits, and monumental analog processes, Boris Zuliani transforms photography into an intimate meditation on memory, presence, and the tactile beauty of imperfection. Between chemistry, light, and human emotion, the French artist creates images that feel less like photographs and more like physical traces of time itself.
For Boris Zuliani, photography has never been about capturing reality quickly. It is about slowing time down long enough for light, emotion, and human presence to quietly reveal themselves. Living in Vietnam since 2007, the French photographer and founder of MOTMET Studio has developed a singular artistic language rooted in analog image making, handcrafted processes, and the poetic imperfections of material photography. At a time when contemporary visual culture moves increasingly toward digital immediacy and artificial perfection, Boris Zuliani has spent years moving deliberately in the opposite direction. His work invites patience, stillness, and the return of physicality to photography itself.
Originally trained in fashion photography at Studio Des Plantes in Paris, Boris began his career immersed in portraiture, atmosphere, texture, and the emotional qualities of light. Yet even during those early years, what fascinated him most was never technical precision alone, but the fragile emotional space existing between the subject, the camera, and time itself. Arriving in Vietnam initially for commercial work, he quickly became captivated by the country’s visual intensity, spontaneity, and layered humanity. Vietnam did not simply offer a new environment. It transformed his entire relationship with image making.
Long before analog photography experienced its contemporary revival, Boris had already begun resisting the disappearance of physical photographic processes. When Polaroid announced the end of its instant film production in 2007, he famously invested nearly all of his savings into transporting more than one hundred kilograms of film to Vietnam in order to preserve a medium already considered obsolete. From this obsession emerged some of his most recognisable early series, including the poetic Long Bien Lovers project created in Hanoi, where young Vietnamese couples were photographed beneath the dim lights and steel structures of the historic Long Bien Bridge. The resulting Polaroids carried a rare atmosphere suspended somewhere between intimacy, nostalgia, cinema, and dream.
Yet Boris Zuliani’s artistic universe would evolve even more profoundly after discovering the wet plate collodion process in Hội An in 2018. Originating in the nineteenth century, the technique requires chemistry, handcrafted preparation, long exposure times, and extraordinary patience. Unlike digital photography, every image exists as a singular physical object shaped directly through the interaction between light, metal, glass, and chemical reaction. For Boris, wet plate photography became far more than a technical process. It became a philosophy of slowness, materiality, and presence.
At MOTMET Studio, hidden quietly among the rice fields between Hội An and Đà Nẵng, Boris creates monumental wet plate portraits using custom built large format cameras capable of producing images as large as two by two meters. The studio itself feels suspended between eras: part laboratory, part artist atelier, part photographic machine. Assisted by craftsmen and collaborators, Boris oversees every stage of creation manually, from preparing glass plates and chemical solutions to exposing and developing the final image by hand. Every portrait becomes entirely unique, impossible to reproduce again in exactly the same way.
This handcrafted relationship with photography defines the emotional intensity of his work. Scratches, silver marks, chemical irregularities, and tonal imperfections are never erased or concealed. Instead, they become essential parts of the image itself. Faces emerge slowly from darkness with extraordinary fragility and depth. Light appears almost sculptural. Time feels embedded physically within the surface. His portraits often carry the haunting resonance of nineteenth century photography while remaining unmistakably contemporary in emotional presence.
Among Boris Zuliani’s most compelling collections are his monumental portraits of Vietnamese subjects, itinerant vendors, ethnic minorities, and communities encountered throughout the country. Rather than constructing artificial narratives, Boris approaches portraiture through encounter, stillness, and trust. The long exposure process demands collaboration between photographer and subject, creating an intimacy that becomes visible within the final image itself. His portraits do not simply document appearance. They reveal presence, silence, vulnerability, and the emotional weight of being seen.
There is also something profoundly tactile within Boris Zuliani’s artistic philosophy. In a world where billions of digital images vanish endlessly into screens, algorithms, and temporary consumption, his work insists on the physical reality of photography. Glass, silver, chemistry, wood, metal, and light remain inseparable from the final artwork. Photography, in Boris’s world, is no longer instantaneous consumption but ritual, craftsmanship, and material memory.
Vietnam continues to shape this visual language deeply. From the softness of Hội An’s light to the emotional density of Hanoi and Saigon, Boris’s work carries traces of the country’s textures, rhythms, and humanity. Yet his images never feel purely documentary. They exist somewhere between memory, dream, and timeless presence, where atmosphere becomes just as important as the subject itself.
Today, through MOTMET Studio, Boris Zuliani continues to create some of the most distinctive analog photographic works emerging from Vietnam’s contemporary art landscape. His creations move fluidly between photography, chemistry, craftsmanship, and sculpture, reminding viewers that images can still possess weight, texture, and soul.
In the world of Boris Zuliani, photography is never simply about seeing. It is about holding light, time, and human presence still long enough for memory to become physical.