Two perspectives

Nicolas photographs, Romain films.
For more than twenty years, they have worked side by side on the same subjects:
yachts, architecture, châteaux, workshops, gastronomy, shipyards.
A complementarity that has become, over time, a true signature.
Two generations, two media, one same requirement:
understand before showing.

Nicolas Claris

Photographer

It takes a great deal of humility to serve one’s subjects and not use them. It takes a great deal of academicism to know how to break the codes. It takes a great deal of love to make generous images. Bruno Belmont, Groupe Bénéteau

He grew up in Cannes, in Le Suquet, between the fishing port and the Palais des Festivals. From that improbable neighbourhood he retains two loyalties: the men of the sea and the power of images.

Before the camera, there were twenty-five years at sea. A sailboat built with his own hands at twenty with a friend, years of deliveries and chartering in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, then his own shipyard, Naviral, near Cannes, where he built 75-foot ketches designed by Ron Holland.

A first experience with the fashion photographer Henri Heiderscheid, in 1974, had set the taste and the foundations; it would take until 2000 for him to dare make it his profession, and to be among the first to bring nautical photography into the digital era.

This maritime knowledge, rare in a photographer, explains his eye: he knows what a boat requires to be shown truly. He has become an international reference in the photography of yachts and their interiors, where everything plays out between an architect’s drawing, a craftsman’s know-how and a light that must remain credible. His images appear in magazines around the world.

Then the frame widens: architecture and the châteaux of the Bordeaux vineyards, the culinary staging of the starred chef Nicolas Magie, industry, construction monitoring, New York, Bangladesh. He claims this eclecticism as a freedom rather than a specialty. A bolt, a stone, a dish, a 45-metre hull: same attention, same respect.

To dare, for him, is to step outside what one knows, to seek to surprise but also to be surprised, never to consider a subject closed. This audacity goes hand in hand with modesty: to look, to listen, to accept being wrong. And with subtlety, which consists in suggesting rather than underlining, in revealing without overacting, in leaving reality its share of mystery.

His approach has been called altruistic: the photographer effaces himself behind the subject to reveal it more fully, and waits for what he calls the blue note, that suspended instant where the real becomes beautiful.

His rule in three words: magnify without deceiving.

And his creed in one sentence: empathy is the mother of bonds.

Milestones

1971 to 1973: Builds Ferossimo, first French ferrocement sailing vessel classified in 1st category
1974 to 1979: Skipper in the Caribbean and Mediterranean: charter and deliveries, from 11 to 26 metres
1980 to 1984: Founds and directs the Naviral shipyard, near Cannes, where 75 and 73-foot ketches and cutters are built
1993: Founds Claris, communications for the yachting and superyacht industry
2000: Professional photographer, pioneer of digital in yachting
2006 to 2011: Chair then elected board member of the superyacht branch, French Maritime Industries Federation
2012 to 2021: Pentax Ambassador, medium format; now Fujifilm 102 Mpx
100+: Magazine covers worldwide

nicolas-claris.com

Romain Claris

Filmmaker

If the wide shot is what we all know how to make, detail is what fails the eye drowning in the way we look at the world. Everything filmed by Romain Claris moves us because it gives us a world more vast, more rich, more complex. Jacques Dubuisson, screenwriter and filmmaker

Born in Cannes in 1983, he grew up in a house where image was a trade before it was a passion. The question resolved in adolescence: it would be cinema. He graduated from the Conservatoire Libre du Cinéma Français, Paris, in 2005.

He went on to create the video department of Claris Image Builder. Twenty years later, the count approaches five hundred films, the vast majority for leading brands, with marked specialization in luxury yachting.

His method rests on a conviction: a brand film is not a catalogue. Each production adapts to the vessel, the shipyard, the target audience. It is not a matter of lining up shots, but of translating an identity into images, which means understanding the object as well as those who designed and built it.

Filmmaker, cinematographer, steadicam operator, editor, composer, he masters the key positions of a film. This versatility allows him to maintain continuity of vision, from first shot to final edit, and preserve coherence that fragmented productions sometimes lose along the way.

Beyond yachting, the field is broad: châteaux and vineyards, architecture, portraits of creators and artisans, commercial films. More recently, tools for AI-generated content have joined his palette, approached like any other material, with the same curiosity for their possibilities as for their limits.

In parallel, his personal work has never been set aside. Since 2000, his short films, art films and documentaries have circulated in festivals: more than a hundred selections and awards, from Best Experimental Film in Amsterdam to Best Poetry Film in Porto.

That recognition owes nothing to commerce. It feeds instead the other side of his work: sense of detail, fluid narration, rhythm, and that ability to make space exist in three shots.

He invests in transmission: he regularly speaks at secondary schools, and has co-directed since 2020 the Bordeaux Shorts Biennale, which he co-founded to champion the short format.

Milestones

1983: Born in Cannes
2000: First short films in festivals
2005: Graduate of the Conservatoire Libre du Cinéma Français
2020: Co-founder and co-director of the Bordeaux Shorts Biennale
2026: In progress: Les comptes de la lune, documentary
500: Films made in twenty years
100+: Selections and awards at international festivals

romainclarisfilm.com

The pair

What binds them is not a division of labour, but artistic complicity, coupled with a mutual respect visible in the image. Two generations, two distinct media, one same subject approached at the same time: their perspectives complement rather than duplicate, and the whole is worth more than the sum.

On location, each covers their medium without ever disputing space with the other. One waits for light, the other waits for movement; they scout together, lend a point of view, signal a detail. This understanding avoids dead time and delivers an efficiency that their clients almost universally note. Each talent sublimes the work of the other rather than seeking to impose itself.

For a shipyard, a charter agency or a broker, the advantage is concrete: a single mobilization of the vessel and its crew, and a complete production, photographs and film, conceived from the outset as a whole.

Still images and moving images share the same hour, the same light, the same decision. Coherence is not to be caught up in editing: it is acquired in shooting.

On the personal side, the pair produces exhibitions where still and moving image share the same wall, books, and sometimes films by one about the work of the other.

One rule holds on both sides, commercial or artistic: serve the subject, never serve yourself with it.