Jougs, 2007

Laurent Troude  

At 18, Laurent Troude thinks he’ll study at university but doesn’t have any particular idea about what he should do. He stumbled across a collection of photography feature magazines and it was a revelation. He decided to have a go, by learning on the job and set out to find internships. He didn’t yet know anything, but wanted it all.

He manages to get an internship as a photographer with the local Saint Denis newspaper, and afterwards starts working for another French newspaper, L’Humanité. He watched, learnt and started taking his first photographs. In 1992, just back from his national service, he started looking for freelance work. L’Humanité, where he had made such a good impression, naturally entrusted him with some feature work and finally took him on as part of their team of photographers due to the consistant quality of his work and the steady progess he was making.

Four years later, he started working with Libération, the French daily who has no equal when it comes to finding and nurturing new talent. That collaboration started in 1996 and is still on-going. In that same year he started working regularly with L’Equipe Magazine and, thanks to them, could finally produce features on the stories he loved.