I never planned to become a photographer. It just sort of happened.
I was working as a brand strategist at the time, but I didn’t like working in a big company and so one day I decided to quit. I had no plan when I left. All I wanted to do was, well, figure out what I wanted to do.
That’s when I bought myself a camera. I’ve always been a big fan of Humans of New York so I decided to do something similar. I grew up in Paris but I moved to Montreal when I was 20, so that’s where I decided to base my project. I started a page with a couple of friends and soon we had 20k likes. We were even featured in newspapers and on TV.
It was around this time that a photographer friend of mine told me about Bored Panda. He’d published a series of pictures on the site which were then used by many other media websites. He suggested I do the same and so I decided to take his advice.
My first post was a series featuring portraits and stories of homeless people I met in Montreal. After appearing on Bored Panda the series went on to be featured in the Huffington Post. It also appeared on Mic.com, Aplus.com and a few other online publications.
The series that really changed everything however was the project I did of my girlfriend hiding from the camera. Before I knew it the pictures were being shared from Bosnia to Brazil, from China to South Africa. Even Ashton Kutcher shared the project on his Facebook page!
In just a couple of weeks my Facebook page went from 800 likes to 8000. It was amazing. I now have people following my work from all corners of the world. I also have a lot of people from across the globe asking for pictures of my girlfriend!
What I love about Bored Panda is that it’s almost entirely user-generated. It’s a collective of really creative initiatives, introduced directly by the people who made them happen. I like learning about projects from the people behind them. It’s so much more emotionally engaging than hearing about something from a journalist who might not have any personal interest in the idea.
Posting my work on Bored Panda has gained me some massive exposure. It’s dramatically increased my online following and it’s really fueled my credibility as a photographer. A couple of media agencies that saw my work on the website have been in touch offering to sell my work, and I also received a picture from Hungary where my series on homelessness had been published in a magazine there.
