Portrait of a Maker: An Afternoon with Grace of Swallowtail Lutherie
An afternoon in a Chelsea workshop, with guitars in various states of becoming and Fred Eaglesmith on the speakers.
Some sessions you plan. Others you just show up for.
My afternoon with Grace at her workshop in Chelsea was the second kind. She had guitars in various states of becoming: ribs bent and waiting, a spruce top clamped to its form, sawdust still in the air from the morning's work. She put on Fred Eaglesmith, talked about our favourite concerts, swapped stories from time spent living in the mountains of BC, and I made photographs while she did what she does.
Grace is the luthier behind Swallowtail Lutherie, based just across the river in the Gatineau Hills. She builds stringed instruments by hand, each one shaped, fitted, and finished in a dusty Chelsea workshop. She's also a musician herself, singing and playing guitar, which means she's building instruments she actually understands from the inside out. You can feel that in the work.
Presence over documentation.
What I wanted to capture was less about documentation and more about presence: the quality of attention Grace brings to the bench, the way her hands move over a piece of wood she's been working with for weeks.
Portrait photography in a space like this is really about listening. The workshop tells you what to do if you let it. You don't impose a setup. You read the room, find the light, and wait for the moment where the person and the place are both just being themselves.
The light that afternoon had that particular late-day quality you get in older buildings: warm, directional, a little dusty. We worked mostly in black and white, but there were moments in colour that felt right too: the raw guitar body under the lamp, her profile over the workbench, the grain of the wood catching the window.
Building instruments she understands from the inside out.
Grace builds stringed instruments by hand, each one shaped, fitted, and finished from raw materials. She's also a musician herself, which means she isn't just building instruments to spec. She's building them with an ear for what they need to sound like.
You can feel that in the work. There's a quality of attention in the shop that's different from a production environment. Everything is at a particular stage for a reason. The tools are where they belong. The materials are chosen, not grabbed.
"The workshop tells you what to do — if you let it."
This is the kind of portrait session that reminds me why I do this. No brief, no lighting setup, no direction to speak of. Just a person in a space they've built for themselves, doing work they understand completely, and me trying to stay out of the way enough to let it show.
If you're a maker, musician, or craftsperson in the Ottawa-Gatineau area and you've been thinking about having photographs made in your space, this is the kind of work I love most.
— Shawn · View portrait work
Photographs made in your space.
Whether you're a maker, a musician, or someone who wants to be photographed somewhere that actually means something, I'd love to hear about your project.
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