Born in the South West of France, Pierre Verdoux was touched by his childhood in Biarritz: “As a teenager, I used to watch, fascinated, the surfers, who came to ride the waves by day and who slept at night in their Combi Volkswagen vans. To me they represented the height of freedom.”

At the same time, stays on the Côte d’Azur where his parents had friends left an indelible impression on him: the Mediterranean seems to him to emit an extraordinary exoticism. « My parents used to stay there when they were newly married. They loved it there and almost bought an apartment in Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse in Marseille right after the last of the concrete had been poured. In a sense they gave me this nostalgia for this fifties French Riviera that I never knew.” 

An aunt who was running a couture house impressed him greatly and led him to discover the fashion world. "She represented for me the height of glamour and trendy Paris of the seventies ».

After studying Graphic Arts (Ecole Duperré, Paris) and graduating with a degree in Art History (Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne), he assisted fashion photographers, including Sarah Moon and Jan Welters.  

A trip to Morocco sparked a longtime friendship with Paul Bowles exiled in Tangier. His work on the footsteps of the American writer and the Beat Generation culminated in an exhibition in Bordeaux (Itinéraires de photographes voyageurs), in Arles (Rencontres internationales de la Photographie) and in a television documentary about Paul Bowles in Ceylon co-written with Yasmin Rajapakse. 

He is currently working on a book about extraordinary hotels around the world.