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.
Exploration of the Soul - Box set - includes the books Solace, Thumaia, and Abelio.
By Sebastien J. Zanella
Limited to 100 copies.
Each box set includes 3 numbered and signed books.
The "Exploration of the Soul" series consists of the books Solace and Thumaia, both arising from my subconscious and bearing witness to a desire to make space for life's mysteries. To feel without the need to explain everything, to develop a language that allows me to express without requiring proof. The limited edition boxed set also includes the third work, Abelio.
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.
Long before all this, before you arrived here, before I even became aware of the world we live in, I had already taken a different path from the one laid out by our contemporaries. A path that led me to the margins, on the road with the freest people I’ve ever known. And so, I began documenting my encounters, my flaws, my dreams, and my wanderings—first in a journal, then a magazine, and eventually in books that have followed me for over 25 years. I called it Desillusion—it was my passport to explore the world, my dynamite to shatter preconceptions, my school for learning life through touch.
Desillusion Days - My Life on Films returns to the origins of my journey, to my visual wanderings, those of a young adult with a gaze still in formation—raw, unstable, without pretense. These images are the foundation of who I am, a collection of stolen moments that were never meant to be seen, let alone printed. It’s an unvarnished self-portrait, a testament to a path forged through mistakes, wounds, and raw truth. An ode to imperfection, to the beauty that hides in every corner of our existence.
Captured between 2009 and 2014, these images began with the discovery of a Yashica point-and-shoot at a flea market (until then, I had devoted myself solely to writing) and mark the end of Desillusion in its original form.
This book, titled My Life on Film - Desillusion Days, is composed of 256 pages of moments captured on the fly, a simultaneous ode to nothing and everything.
Limited to 500 copies, with a special edition of 150 copies in collaboration with Polaroid.
Dear Now, is the first Large format photo zine by Sebastien J. Zanella
filled by more than eighty pictures expressing the immediacy & the liberty of the moment.
“Sometimes, often, words are not enough.
This year was one of them, I dive so deep into darkness that the only way to swim above the surface, was to simply focus on now.
No try, no expectation, just being there & free.”
Dear Now, is a collection of photography made thought this past years, & selected for their abilities to have for only meaning : to be alive.
First delivery, early December.
First Edition of 600.
Numeroted & Signed
15 by 12 inches
37 x 29cm
76 pages.
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.
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.
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.
🥀