Who am I ?
A Short Biography of Pejan
4 years of adventure
Every adventure starts with a simple decision. For me, I just had to leave my job, find a bicycle, a tent, a stove, some good books, and then leave. As I hit the road, I was ready to live a simple life where every day feels like Sunday.
During four years I traveled by bicycle in Eastern Europe, Middle-East and Asia. Far east somehow always attracted me, like if a bit of me always belonged there. I wanted to move slowly, to go back to the basics and learn to look at the world with new eyes. I wanted to reconnect with life, to understand, experience and feel the world without filter.
To photograph the world
For many years I’ve been passionate about photography, from street photography to portraits, landscapes or even abstract. I’ve always been captivated by the variety of stories an image can tell, by all the feelings one can capture and how each person will relate to it, according to his own sensitivity and his own story.
As I traveled, photography naturally became a way to testify of the beauty of our world, to share the intensity of a moment, through my eyes.
My love for life and beauty dragged me to photography, and in return, photography taught be to become to slow down and to become more attentive to life.
When Brave Lemming became Pejan
Do you remember an amazing website with plenty of adventure stories and some cool photos, but a name as weird as bravelemming.com ?
Well, back in 2010, when I picked that name, I thought I would only write about cycling around the world… I did it for some time and then I started to focus more on photography. The thing is, whatever name you chose, it sticks to you so it took me years before I decided to abandon Bravelemming… I still have the sticker on my bike though !
Well, even if Pejan is a pseudonym, it is deeply connected to who I am, like a “citizen of the world” version of me.
It actually has roots in the Middle-East, it is pronounced like in Czech and it contains the same letters as my original surname. That almost sound perfect, except that most people in France don’t have a clue about how to pronounce it… Well, even though it is written with a “j”, it is to be pronounced “Peyan“, like the Slavic way where the letter “j” sounds “y” like “yes”. Right, now it sounds better !