Born in April 1990 in Reims, France, from a French mother and a Lebanese father, I discovered a passion for photography and travel around the age of twenty. Since then, I’ve spent almost three years of my life travelling with my camera as my only companion. Forty countries crossed, thousands of kilometers wandered around the world, from the snow-capped peaks of Nepal to the burning beaches of Ghana, from the banks of the Amazon in Peru to those of the Ganges in India, passing by the skyscrapers of New York, the Corcovado of Rio de Janeiro or even the steppes of Mongolia. During all these trips, I tried through my camera to capture, in 1/125th of a second, moments of life, emotions and then to transmit them into images, always placing the human at the center of my pictures. It was not a question of taking a picture of what I wanted to show, but rather of capturing what I saw.

 

   It was in August 2010 during my first trip, a one-month train journey through Europe, that I tasted for the first time the total freedom that travel provides, of discovering new places, new cultures, but also of discovering yourself, because it is obvious that all of these journeys changed me, each in their own way, and made me who I am today. It was also during this trip that this desire grew inside of me, to show that, if countries have borders and even if the skin color or the culture sometimes changes, the emotions themselves, very often, remain the same. In every country the sunlight, in every country the carefree childhood, the wisdom of old age or the beauty of love.

 

   In October 2016, I started a journey of a little more than one year and over 42 000 km, from Kathmandu in Nepal to Paris in France, hitting the road through countries, cities and cultures. That adventure will soon be the subject of a book in which I will retrace my journey in images, from the first day to the last. In November 2018, it was in South America and more precisely in Colombia that I started a new trip, which took me, 397 days of travel and more than 40 000 km later, to the foot of the Corcovado of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. A trip through the South American continent during which I immersed myself in a Latin culture that has not left me since.

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   In August 2020, following the explosion of the Beirut port, I decided to settle in Lebanon and to testify, through my photos, the daily life of this country plunged into the midst of a humanitarian, political and economic crisis. A testimony that gave birth to my first photography book "Beirut, from ashes to anger, a story of Lebanon" released in June 2021. It is also from this country that I started working as a photojournalist and made my first photo reports for various media, both local or foreign. This work as a photojournalist also took me to Afghanistan where I went in November 2021 with journalist Inès Gil to report about the situation of the country after the return to power of the Taliban. Still based in Beirut to this day, I continue to tell Lebanon through my photos and also prepare projects that will take me back again to the four corners of the world.

 

   Today, through this website, I want to share with you a piece of my travels in pictures. My photos don’t claim to be beautiful. They show the truth, the everyday life, the life of people who are so distantly far away but yet so emotionally close to each other. Here you will find stories hidden behind every picture and lives hidden behind every pair of eyes. But above all you will find a large part of them, of all of these people who live every day in the four corners of the world. These photos were taken depending on the wind, depending on my life story, my travels and my meetings, at the corner of a street or in the middle of nowhere. For every moment that I found beautiful, sad, full of joy, or just natural, I pressed the shutter button of my camera. I tried to capture the beauty of the world, but also the beauty of the people who inhabit it. 

 

   So I hope that through these photos you will find a little of all this, of all these little things that make life. I do not pretend to be an artist, I just had the chance to see and live beautiful moments. I just want to show them to you.

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Florient Zwein