About
Quentin Carlier
I’m a wedding and couple photographer based in Paris. The day is worked out properly in advance, so that once it starts nothing has to stop for the camera.
Weddings in Paris, in Provence and anywhere in Europe the two of you are getting married, with couple sessions, engagements, proposals and elopements in between. Some couples find me a year before a wedding, others for two quiet hours on a first trip to Paris. The way I work doesn’t change: the thinking happens beforehand, so that when it is actually happening I am not the one interrupting it.
My story
Every portfolio looks good. Here’s the part you can’t see.
My name is Quentin. I’ve been photographing for more than fifteen years, since I was a kid, first as a way of paying attention to the world and then as a way of holding on to it. It began with the people around me and with strangers in the street: the small, unguarded moments that pass and don’t come back. What I do now is still exactly that, with the camera pointed at two people instead of a crowd.
For years my photography work was made in the streets of Paris, mostly at the quiet hours, photographing strangers who were not posing and could not be asked to do it again. You never get a second attempt at one of those, so you learn to see something forming a few seconds before it arrives, find the light and the angle while it is still coming, and take the picture without stepping into it. That is most of what I actually do at a wedding now.
Before I photographed weddings I spent years as a project manager in advertising agencies, running productions where the plan had to survive contact with a real day. I don’t think of that as a previous career so much as the half of this job nobody talks about: the timeline agreed with your planner weeks out, and the photographs that matter to you settled before anyone is getting dressed. None of that is a list of poses. It is a list of people, the ones you will go looking for first when the photographs arrive.
Paris is where I live and where most of my year happens. I know its light at every hour and its quiet corners in every season, which spots empty out at sunrise and which ones are worth the early alarm. The rest of the year takes me out of the city, for weddings in Provence, elopements, and celebrations that run over several days and several places. Wherever it is, I arrive early, walk the ground and work out where the day is going to be at its best before it starts.
I’ve shot film for years, medium format and 35mm, colour and black and white. On weddings and on couple sessions alike it is an option added to the digital coverage rather than part of it, and a good number of couples take it. When they do, it is developed and scanned here in Paris.
How I work
You won’t be pulled out of your own day
Before anything else I want to know how you found each other, what makes you laugh, who matters enough to be in the photographs you’ll keep. The more I understand about the two of you, the fewer decisions I’m making on instinct while it is happening.
Then I don’t hand out poses. There is a short window, agreed in advance and kept short, where I’ll give you some gentle direction: where to walk, where to look, something to react to. Outside it I’m watching rather than directing. I am there for all of it, close to it, and I interrupt none of it: no stopping a room to set something up, no asking the two of you to do a moment again for the camera.
Most couples tell me beforehand that they feel awkward in front of a camera. On a session that sorts itself out inside the first ten minutes. A wedding day does not hand you ten spare minutes, so we deal with it long before instead: by the time yours comes round, I am not a stranger with a camera. We will have spoken plenty by then, about the timeline, about the people who cannot be missed, about what you actually want out of the day. The person photographing your morning is someone you have already planned it with, which is not the same as a supplier you met once and booked.
It is also why I suggest an engagement session before the wedding, and why most couples I photograph do one. A couple of hours somewhere in Paris, with nothing at stake and no schedule to keep, is the easiest way to find out how I work and to get used to having a camera nearby. Whatever awkwardness there is gets spent on an ordinary afternoon rather than on your wedding day.
My hope is that years from now these still look like the two of you, rather than like an afternoon that was arranged. Photographs are made once, while it is happening, or not at all, which is the whole reason I plan the way I do.
Tell me about your day.
I reply personally, usually within a few hours, with my availability and the next steps. Sending an enquiry does not commit you to a booking.
Prefer to email me directly? [email protected].