Biography

Quoc-Trung PHAN is born in 1975, February 16th, in Saigon, in Vietnam.

In 1984, with the wave of “boat people” and after two unfruitful attempts, he manages to leave the country with his mother. The chance of the maritime rescue makes him cross the road of a French steamer, the “Valbelle Knight”, and brings him in France after a few adminitrative months in Hong-Kong.

Quoc-Trung grows in the southern suburbs of Paris in a cosmopolitan place. When he is in fifth class, one of his school-fellows, incompetent to correctly pronounce his first name, decides to call him “Crocus”; the consonance is rather close to his first name and since, even his mother calls him “Crocus”.

He arrives at the college and impassioned for arts as music (he will play battery), theatre, and especially photography.

The baccalaureat C obtained, he begins without real motivation, studying at the university Paris VII (Jussieu) mathematics and data processing. He obtains the diploma DEUG MIAS (Mathematics, Data processing and Applications to Sciences). During these years he interests more particularly in photography by joining a photo club.

All these studies seeming to carry out to nothing, he decides to make a break while passing a contest to do his military service in the ECPA (Establishment Cinematographic and Photographic of the Armies). Surrounded of young cinema directors, photographers and other technicians of cinema, he spends the ten most intense months of emotion, disappointment and joy which he never lives; ten unforgettable months. Affected at the Black & White laboratory as laboratory assistant, his serious, rigour and effectiveness are worth to him to be named responsible of the laboratory at the end of his service and to be decorated with the bronze medal as “Good Soldier”.

At the end of his military service, he tries the entrance examination at the Higher National School Louis Lumière. Arrived at the second place, he studies during three years photography, option Image Processing, and obtains his diploma in 2002, thus validating a bac+5.

He postulates then at the Opale agency, photographic agency specialized in the portrait of writer, as Black & White laboratory assistant. Two years afterwards, he becomes technical director of the agency, metamorphose its information processing system and re-examines in-depth processes of validation, treatment and sale of the photographs by accentuating the importance of Internet. The automation of the tasks makes it possible to decrease appreciably the workload of each one while increasing quality of the service rendered to the press, magazines and publishers. The sales of the agency increased considerably in two years.

The possibility of a future development in this branch is almost zero, or non-existent, he’s moving towards in high level systems programming for the Web and more specifically based on the Java / J2EE technology. Quickly integrated into an international service company, he participates in project development for major accounts, such as Renault and France Telecom (Orange). His capacity for adaptation, analysis, synthesis, and sense of teamwork, makes him quickly move from developer to quality manager.

In the mean time, he becomes self-based entrepreneur and creates his company: i-Neko. Specialized in digitizing and retouching of photographic films for professionals and individuals, he also creates graphics for several websites and models of books for various publishers. With Crocus, rigor in science and creativity reach to coexist.

Three years passed away, the international economic crisis leave its trace on French companies, high projects are hanging out waiting for money and become boring. In the meanwhile, two travels to Montreal make grow up an idea, a need, a crazy envy of space and caribous. One year of administrative request later, Crocus obtains a Permanent Resident authorization for living in Canada and decides to try another adventure far away from Paris. Direction Montreal, summer heatwave, winter snow, and poutine.

Alain Gravelet (2010, September)