Some passions are inherited. Others are earned. Mine were both.
Where it all began. I grew up in a home where creativity wasn’t a hobby – it was a way of life. My mother painted, crafted, and turned ordinary spaces into something beautiful. My father was a professional photographer who traveled the French countryside chasing movement: muddy rally stages, tennis championships, the raw edge of sport at its most elemental. Long before I ever held a camera myself, I was watching him work, living among his prints hung throughout our home - learning, without knowing I was learning, that a great photograph is really just a great story told in a single frame.
Motorsport. It ran through our family like a current. My parents didn't just watch racing - they lived it. Together with friends and family mechanics, they built their own rally cars from the ground up - a Simca Rallye 2, then a Simca Rallye 3 - my father behind the wheel, my mother navigating beside him as co-driver, the two of them young and fearless on rally stages. I grew up with motorsport on the television – Formula 1, touring cars, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, NASCAR - my father breaking down every race with the quiet authority of someone who understood cars the way others understand music. That love of speed, precision, and the mechanical ballet of motorsport has never left me - by sixteen, I was already on the track myself, competing in amateur endurance karting races, including 6-hour and 24-hour events..
Mountains. For many summers throughout my childhood - from as far back as I can remember to my early teens, our family disappeared into the Pyrenees - that vast, wild range straddling France and Spain, where nature had a way of resetting everything. Those landscapes were my first real subjects. Something about scale, light, and silence taught me to slow down and look properly. The adventure and the image became inseparable for me there, and they still are..
Into the wild. Years later, that pull toward high places only deepened. I took ice climbing courses, attempted the summit of Mount Jefferson and Mount Washington in the dead of winter - setting out by night to reach the top at sunrise, in some of the coldest and most violent conditions those peaks offer. Come summer, a different kind of wilderness: eight days deep in the backcountry of Yosemite with one of my closest friends, carrying everything we needed with heavy bagpacks, filtering water from streams, no trail markers, no crowds - just raw landscape and a camera. The privilege was never the photograph. It was being there.
Triathlon. Triathlon eventually consumed another chapter of my life entirely. I competed at the Ironman distance, and for a time ran a triathlon shop where we sponsored professional athletes – following their journeys, supporting their seasons, living close to the sport at its highest level. That world pulled me further into photography too. At one point I found myself on the back of a motorcycle, camera in hand, shooting an Ironman race for a francophone media outlet – weaving through the course, chasing athletes mid-effort, learning to read a race the way my father once read a rally stage.
Brotherhood & frozen expeditions. My brother caught the photography bug just as deeply. He is now an active presence on the photography scene, and every year we head north together to the CRYO Races - a remarkable event where runners cross the frozen surface of Lac Saint-Jean in winter, under a starry sky, hearing nothing but the sound of their own footsteps in the snow. The race supports the On the Tip of the Toes Foundation. It is exactly the kind of place where great photographs happen: raw conditions, raw emotion, and a landscape that does most of the work for you.
Photography, for me, is that language. It's how I make sense of movement, of stillness, of the landscapes and moments that refuse to sit quietly and be forgotten.
