Making Life a Form of Poetry
Looking at the world long enough to learn how to stay.
A Chronological Path
1998-2026
This chronology is not a résumé.
It is a trace.
A series of moments, books, encounters and departures that slowly shaped a way of looking at the world. Each step did not replace the previous one. It deepened it.
What follows is not a story of success or progression, but a path made of shifts, doubts, ruptures and returns. A life spent learning how to stay present, and how to turn experience into poetry.
Dates are only landmarks.
The movement is interior.
1998 - 2012
I created Desillusion when I was sixteen years old.
At first, it was a fanzine.
A raw object made with instinct, talking about my friends skaters, surfers, explorers of freedom, and about what was happening around my village. A way to document our world before it disappeared.
Over fourteen years, Desillusion grew with me.
From a local publication, it became regional, then national, then international, until it turned into a reference magazine for skate life, surf and style culture worldwide.
Through Desillusion, I documented a generation and collaborated with icons of that culture such as Dylan Rieder, Eric Koston, Andrew Reynolds, Dane Reynolds, Ozzie Wright, Dave Rastovich, John John Florence etc.
In the early 2010s, I decided to stop the magazine.
I no longer wanted to hide behind a publication or behind the work of others. I felt the need to speak in my own name, to express a vision of the world, to begin a more personal quest.
Wave Melancholia was born from that rupture.
It is a photographic journey through skate and surf spots around the world, carried by the nostalgia of adolescence. A time when this culture meant everything to me. It raised me. It was my family. And at that moment, I was learning how to leave.
A square softcover book of more than two hundred pages.
A farewell. And a step forward.
A poetic trilogy / Solace - Thumaia - Abelio
Two years later, Solace marked a shift.
Less documentary. More internal.
I began to make my poetry visible and to build my own mythology.
In Panama, I met Jake, a surfer traveling alone around the world. Together we went to a small island. I imagined a man who had fallen in love with the sun. Every sunset broke his heart. Every sunrise gave him hope again. Until one day, he died burned by what he loved.
A metaphor of my teenage passion, my excessive way of embracing the world, and the melancholy that always follows.
Thumaia came next, during the global pandemic and the rise of the #MeToo movement.
I suddenly felt like a colonizer of images. Traveling, taking, bringing things back home, shining. And then the boat sank.
On a beach, I began to question masculinity, conquest, testosterone, domination, and the masculine disconnection from nature. I imagined a feminine figure emerging from the ocean. Not as a truth, but as a sensation. A perfume. ( Thumaia means perfume in ancient Greek.)
Not a statement. A search.
Abelio, the final book of the trilogy, accompanied my departure from France to the Canary Islands.
I documented this transition with a damaged camera, letting light burn the film. To burn the past. To allow a rebirth somewhere else. A soft and solar transformation.
Life as raw material / My Life on Films Vol 1 & 2
In 2020, My Life on Films was released.
For years, I had been photographing fragments of my daily life. Random moments. Small things. During the pandemic, these small things became everything.
Most of the book was shot within two hundred meters of my home.
Trying to capture the joy of the ordinary. What we no longer see because we are too busy projecting ourselves elsewhere.
In 2024, Volume II looked back at the Desillusion years.
I realized that I had always been documenting my life. That everything was already there. The source. The beginning of a philosophy I was still shaping.
A moment of darkness - Dear Now
Dear Now is a turning point.
A large A3 book gathering the images that gave me faith in life again.
At that time, I was going through a deep personal collapse. Passion had disappeared.
Designing this book became the light at the end of the tunnel.
It helped me return to photography. And to embody my philosophy more deeply.
Commercial collaborations
Documentary freedom
Alongside my personal work, I accepted commercial collaborations only when complete freedom of narration was granted.
For five years, I documented the life and creative process of master perfumer Jacques Cavallier for Louis Vuitton.
A long term, intimate documentary work that resulted in a book. A portrait of creation as a lifelong obsession rather than a product.
Later, fashion designer Anthony Vaccarello gave me full carte blanche for Yves Saint Laurent.
I chose to document adolescence. That fragile age where, even in chaos, hope still survives through skateboarding and surfing.
I traveled to Belgrade, a city deeply marked by destruction, returning there twenty three times. Then to Dakar, recently devastated by a storm.
In these broken places, I met teenagers who still dare to dream. To skate. To imagine another future.
These collaborations were never side projects.
They were extensions of my gaze. Spaces where I was allowed to look slowly, respectfully, and honestly.
Transmission and community
Workshops and The New New Adventurer Club
As my vision became clearer, I no longer knew how to answer people asking about cameras or techniques.
My work does not live in equipment.
It lives in a way of seeing the world.
For almost ten years now, I have shared this philosophy through workshops. Not as lessons, but as experiences.
From this path, The New New Adventurer Club was born.
A community of those who have walked with me through workshops or through life itself. To experiment with the world together. And to no longer be alone facing the constant noise.
Desillusion Utopia
The present as a path
In 2024 and 2025, I confronted my Western ideals with other philosophies.
Sufi dancers in Turkey. Touaregs in the Sahara. Surfers and thinkers in Hawaii.
I did not find a universal truth.
I found something simpler.
The only truth that exists is the present.
The path we are walking.
Desillusion Utopia was born from that realization.
An annual book that documents inner transformation rather than external movement. An intimate travel journal mixing photography, painting, writing and poetry.
Today
In 2026, it has been thirty years since I started exploring and looking at the world intensely.
Skateboarding and surfing taught me one essential thing.
To inhabit the present moment. And to claim freedom.
To make life itself a form of poetry.
Art, photography and writing are only companions. Excuses to live more intensely. To romanticize reality. To restore meaning.
For the future, I hope to continue documenting the path, accompanying others through workshops, and growing The New New Adventurer Club.
But above all, to remain present.
Present enough to still be amazed, moved, and shaken by the incredible magic of life.
🥀