I did not come to France to become a photographer. I came to do an MBA.
It was 2021, and I had just landed in Nantes to start the Full-Time MBA program at Audencia Business School. New city, new language, new everything. Like most international students, I spent the first weeks just trying to figure out where things were, what was open, and how to say “excuse me” without sounding completely lost.
But I had a camera. And I had time between classes. And Nantes, as it turns out, is a city that rewards curiosity.
I started photographing the people around me — classmates, strangers, people I bumped into at markets and along the riverbank, people who looked like they had somewhere to be or nowhere at all. It was personal. It was my way of processing a new place and, more honestly, of making myself feel less like a visitor.
At some point, those photos started adding up.
In early 2022, I was awarded a CVEC grant through Audencia, which made it possible to turn that personal archive into something real. By March, the exhibition was up. Fifty photographs, properly printed on art paper, properly framed, properly hung in the hall of the Atlantic Campus. The exhibition was called Nantais et Al, which felt right. A nod to the city, and to all the people who had quietly become part of my story there.
It was ephemeral by design, running for about two weeks, with a closing date that landed on the school’s Intercultural Day. But what surprised me was how it felt standing in that hall, watching people stop and look. Some of them recognised themselves in the frames. Others saw something they hadn’t noticed before, even about a city they had lived in for years.
That moment stayed with me.
Most of those fifty photographs are still on the walls at both the Atlantique Campus and the City Campus. Permanently now. Which means some part of that Nantes chapter is still hanging somewhere, long after I moved on.
Shortly after finishing my MBA, I moved to Paris.
And Paris, as anyone who has walked its streets with open eyes will tell you, is relentless. It does not wait for you to be ready. It just keeps happening, right in front of you, in the metro and at the crosswalks and in the small radius of light that spills out of a boulangerie at seven in the morning.
I started photographing it the same way I photographed Nantes. With curiosity, and with the quiet belief that something worth seeing was already there. I just had to show up.
That is still what drives everything you see on this site. Not technique, not gear, not a plan. Just the habit of paying attention, which started, as most good habits do, almost by accident.
In a city I did not expect. During a year I did not fully understand until it was over.
That is how it started.