Born in 1978.  Lives in Paris.


"I am French, of Iranian-Iraqi descent and aged twenty-eight. The first time I ever travelled was in a bassinet, when my family left its homeland. I lived in Baghdad and Cairo. Travel then became a necessity, a way of getting free of a sterile, repetitive vision of places and people, and of myself. My studies took me more or less randomly from the exact sciences to architecture, with some biology thrown in; but they let me travel, mainly in Asia – Java, Sumatra, Borneo, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, India – and bring back pictures, initially with no goal, no intent beyond the pleasure of taking photographs.  

At first my inspiration was the great tropical forests of our planet, but now it's the chaos of our polluted metropolises. The adventure goes on…I met some professional photographers in China in 2005, and that's when I decided to work methodically, lay down some principles that would help me develop a style. And when I came back to France with my first serious work – I called it Cities are like Oceans, but I should have said "like jungles" – I decided to go professional myself."



Cyrus Cornut presented his work at the Rencontres d'Arles in 2010: "France 14" and in 2006: "China, cities are like oceans"