In the year 2000, amidst the chaos of a garbage dump in an unknown corner of Latin America, photographer Jean-Marc Wullschleger (known as Jean Marc Wull) stumbled upon a forgotten relic: a box of old medium format negatives. At the time, he and his partner were halfway through a three-year journey across the continent in their trusty van. Intrigued by the box’s mysterious contents, Jean-Marc brought it back to Europe, only to set it aside and forget about it for 15 long years.

It wasn’t until 2015 that the box reemerged from obscurity. Dusting it off, Jean-Marc finally began the painstaking process of examining its contents. The negatives revealed something extraordinary: hundreds of striking black-and-white portraits, each one capturing the raw humanity of men and women who had once stood before a camera in the 1970s. But who were they? And who was the photographer behind these beautiful images?

One portrait held the key to unraveling the mystery. It was an image of a firefighter, his uniform adorned with a badge that read “Guatemala.” Armed with this crucial clue, Jean-Marc felt compelled to return to Central America to uncover the story behind the box. He enlisted the help of his friend, Florent de la Tullaye, a documentary filmmaker equally captivated by the forgotten portraits.

Their journey led them deep into Guatemala, from fire station to fire station, as they sought to identify the firefighter in the photograph. They found Carlos E. Leon, in Chiquimulilla, a small town in the department of Santa Rosa, near the border with El Salvador.

Carlos revealed the missing piece of the puzzle. The photographer behind the portraits was none other than Arthuro Gaëtan, the village’s beloved studio photographer, who had passed away over three decades earlier. The box of negatives was all that remained of his life’s work.

Driven by a desire to honor Gaëtan’s legacy, Jean-Marc revisited the community, Rolleiflex in hand, to photograph those who had once posed for Arthuro’s lens.

Fifty years later, these new portraits bridged the gap between past and present, capturing the enduring spirit of this small Guatemala community.