I’m Sebastien J. Zanella, photographer, filmmaker and poet.
Welcome to my world ; a poetic journey through reality, where creation becomes a way of being.
Desillusion UTOPIA is a long term book project shaped by the road, encounters, and lives lived outside the center.
Each edition gathers photographs, texts, and traces from this ongoing work.
Owning the latest book also opens access to a private online space, where the work continues beyond its pages.
An access code is provided with the book.
Desillusion Utopia was born from a late understanding. For years I believed I was documenting skateboarding and surfing. I thought I was telling the story of practices and performances and scenes. With time I realised that neither I nor Desillusion had ever truly been there for the sport. What drew me from the beginning was the sensitivity that grows out of a singular relationship to the world. What I was looking for in the streets and empty pools was never the technical gesture. It was the way the city reshapes those who move through it. What I was searching for in the ocean was not the perfect wave. It was that almost spiritual relationship to a living force that shapes a human being from within.
The skaters and surfers I photographed carried something unique. They moved through the world in a different way. They had a way of inhabiting the street or the sea that created a vision of reality no one else possessed. I thought I was following them. In truth I was already trying to understand myself through them.
Today with Desillusion Utopia this quest has shifted. I am no longer just a witness to the way others live. I have become the space of the experience. I walk and travel and get lost and change. I inhabit the world as they once did, not to accomplish a feat but to let each place redraw the way I feel.
This book gathers these transformations. It tells how the road and the light and the fatigue and the doubt and the joy become a lived form of poetry. It also carries the figures who embodied this way of being, sometimes without knowing it. Tony Alva in L.A., Dan Pascacio in Mexico, the Sufi in turkey, The Amazigh in Sahara and Ethan Lau in Hawaii and many others. People who tried to make their life a form of poetry. People who showed me that an existence can become a work.
Desillusion Utopia is not a book about what I saw. It is a book about what the world has done to me. It is a continuation of what Desillusion has always been without ever naming it. An invitation to look at life as a living matter that shapes us if we allow ourselves to surrender to it.
Desillusion Utopia - Attempt One
Format : 32 cm by 42 cm
100 loose folio pages
Comes with the New New Adventurer booklet - 64 pages
Includes one Desillusion sticker sheet
This book is more than an object.
Owning the latest edition of Desillusion UTOPIA grants access to a private online space.
A place where I share ongoing reflections from the road, books that inspire my work, behind the scenes moments, playlists, interviews, short films, and other traces gathered along the way.
An access code is provided with the book.
The Path
Every week, I send a fragment of my handwritten journal — written on the road, in the silence, or in the storm.
Thoughts, photos, and questions to walk with.
The Utopia
A hidden room for those who want to go further.
Full access to my world: photo essays, interviews, behind-the-scenes, letters, and stories from the road.
no ads, no noise. Just meaning
Join me on this journey : a week to explore who you are through the act of creating, to reconnect with meaning, and to build together a world where life itself becomes the work of art.
Tenerife
Canarias Island
SOLD OUT
Two workshops — ten people only
Feb 23-27
August 3-7
Tenerife
Canarias Island
2026 Subscription open
WE BECOME
TOGETHER
“What if we truly are the world we create? Then let it flow, let it go, let it stay raw—like waves, birds, time, life, tragedy, and love. All it takes is that first step, arms open, into the unknown.”
Echoes & Fragments
This is not just a store.
It’s an extension of the path — a place where images, books, prints, and words gathered along the way become tangible.
Each Books was thought, carried, sometimes scribbled in a notebook or dreamt on a cliff’s edge. They hold the dust of the journey, the doubts, the sparks, the raw beauty of fleeting moments.
Photographer, filmmaker, and poet, Sébastien J. Zanella explores the unseen. For over two decades, his work has documented freedom in all its forms—from skateboarding to surfing, from the margins to vast open spaces, from the tangible to the intangible.
His vision, both raw and lyrical, captures the moment where movement becomes poetry. Through his images and narratives, he seeks to reveal what lingers beneath the surface of reality.
After collaborating with some of the world’s most prestigious organizations and crafting books for Louis Vuitton and Saint Laurent, he has shaped visual poetry for Chloé, Hermès, and more.
Today, he steps away from fleeting validations to build a space where art is no longer just observation, but participation. Desillusion Utopia, his immersive workshops, and his epistolary exchanges invite a deeper connection—a world where the unknown is not to be feared, but embraced as a promise of creation.
Let’s Create Together.
contact me on thepath@sebzanella.com