Crocus photographes website

Quoc-Trung PHAN is born on February 16th, 1975 in Saigon, in Viêt-Nam.

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 D.E.U.G. M.I.A.S. (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 E.C.P.A. (Cinematographic and Photographic Establishment 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.

Crocus is today in the search of new professional adventures which will enable him to continue to open out in a constructive exchange with the company.

Alain Gravelet