For more than 150 years, in the high, winter-locked cantons of the Jura region, the Swiss have cultivated and passed from generation to generation the secrets and skills of precision mechanism manufacture. It is there, in Sainte-Croix, that the H16 was developed. In 1935, Paillard described the camera as “well designed in its shape and concept.” A caption beneath a factory photograph reminds us that every minute, a camera was produced there.

Behind every Bolex lies a tradition of combined craftsmanship: the watchmaker, the engineer, the optical designer, the physicist. Yet the workers themselves are strangely absent.