There is something that happens when you arrive in a city where you do not fully belong yet. You look differently. You have not learned to stop noticing things.
Locals build up a kind of visual immunity over time. The same route, the same faces, the same light at the same hour. The brain starts filtering it out because familiarity is efficient. But when you are new, none of that filtering exists. Everything is still slightly strange, slightly worth a second look. And if you happen to carry a camera, that strangeness becomes something you can use.
That is what it felt like in the early Paris days. I was not documenting the city. I was just paying attention to it, because I did not yet know how not to.
The metro was where it clicked for me.
There is something about underground transit that strips people down to something honest. Nobody is performing. They are tired, or thinking, or staring at nothing in particular. The carriage rocks and everyone sways together without acknowledging each other. It is one of the strangest forms of collective solitude I have ever seen, and Paris does it at a scale and speed that is almost cinematic.
I started spending time down there with no specific plan. Just watching. Then photographing.
In 2022, one of those metro frames won me first place at the inaugural GR Photo Festival. It was a crowd shot. Which surprised me at first, and then, the more I thought about it, did not surprise me at all.
Crowds, it turns out, are where I feel most at home as a photographer.
Not because I like noise or chaos, though Paris has plenty of both. But because a crowd is where individual moments happen inside a collective one. You get layers. You get accidental geometry. You get a face that is completely somewhere else while everything around it is moving fast. The tension between the individual and the mass is where the photograph lives, at least for me.
It has taken time to understand that about myself. Street photography is not a style you choose from a menu. You figure it out by shooting, by looking back at what you made, by noticing which frames you keep returning to and asking yourself why.
For me, the answer kept coming back to crowds.
In 2024, I won the 3rd edition of the GR Photo Festival with another one. A concert this time, a very different energy from the metro, but the same instinct: find the moment inside the chaos. Find the face, or the gesture, or the fraction of a second where something true is visible.
Then in 2025, on a Paris street, PSG fans poured out to celebrate their team’s path to the Champions League final. The city became briefly, loudly, completely itself. I was there with a camera, albeit a mobile phone camera. That image went on to win the OnePlus Photography Awards 2025.
Three competitions. Three crowd shots. The pattern is hard to argue with.
But what I want to be clear about is that none of this came from a plan. There was no moment where I decided: crowds are my thing. It emerged from the work, slowly, the way most honest things do.
The outsider eye helped. Being foreign in Paris meant I was always slightly alert, always processing what I was seeing rather than glossing over it. A crowd of Parisians doing something ordinary was not ordinary to me. It was new every time. And that newness kept me curious enough to raise the camera.
I am still learning. Every shoot teaches me something I did not know the shoot before. What I know now is the direction, which is more than I had when I first stepped onto a Paris metro platform, camera in hand, with no idea what I was looking for.
Sometimes not knowing is exactly the right place to start.