My Friend Told Me To Post My Photographs On Bored Panda And It Kickstarted My Career

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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!

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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.

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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.

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