French documentary photographer Elliott Verdier, at the age of 25, has already dedicated his life to photojournalism and documentary photography. It seems fitting that his 2016 series, A Shaded Path, would be received with critical acclaim from the likes of The British Journal of Photography, Lensculture, and Format considering he has always known exactly what direction he wanted his life to take. He distinctly remembers his childhood afternoons spent with his Godfather, combing through his photographic and documentary print collection of far off lands, peoples, and cultures. He loved the idea of these photographers traveling to distant places and living exciting lives as a cultural jet setter with nowhere else to travel to but forward onto their next adventure. These feelings of invigorating wanderlust would propel him to pursue a career as a photojournalist.

In 2012, at the age of 19, Verdier officially began his journey to become the photographer he had always wanted to be. He successfully applied for and received a grant from the National Zellidja Scholarship Foundation, an organization that equips young men and women under the age of 20 with the funding necessary to experience life in an autonomous way. The condition of this grant is that the individual receiving it must travel alone, and for at least one month, to further the organization's goal of enlightening them at a crucial stage of their development, to “develop essential qualities for them, businesses, society”. It was via this grant that Verdier was able to embark on his first documentary project as a photographer.

With funding in hand, Verdier traveled to Burma (Myanmar) and Thailand to create a project titled The Care Villa: A Residency for Karen’s Hope. His project captured a series of portraits of former rebel soldiers of the Karen National Liberation Army who had been victims of land-mines in their fight against the Burmese state for Karen Independence on the border between Burma (Myanmar) and Thailand. It was through his experience with this project that Verdier was accepted to Les Écoles de Condé, a photography institute in Paris, France in September 2012. Verdier graduated from the institute in June 2015, but the majority of what he learned was through his experiences continuing to document the people and conditions of Southeast Asian countries. Throughout his educational career he consistently traveled back to Burma (Myanmar) and Indonesia during summer breaks in his schooling schedule.

In 2014, he traveled to Cisarua, Indonesia to learn about and document the Afgahn refugees in a perpetual state of transition on their journey to find permanent refuge. He did this by spending a month with three Afghan refugees, living with them in the slum area they were restricted to and getting to know them personally. He of course learned that they had terrible stories and astonishing journeys, but what surprised him was “discovering their lonely boredom waiting for legal papers. I was unconsciously expecting myself to reproduce a painful and dramatic vision of refugees. But the truth is, I was young, without experience, without backup, without contact, without guidelines… I have just ended up in the middle of nowhere, sharing a square room with three Afghan refugees and their daily life, their intimacy; being as bored as them.” Verdier said that this experience “changed my relationship with the people I photograph, and more widely, the way I wanted to document things”. He notated that though his formal photographic education was important he discovered that the one thing that was missing from classical photojournalism culture was intimacy.