Valentin Giraldi AKA Hans Zeeldieb was born in 1989 and grew up in Nevers, a little town in the middle of France.

At the age of 18 he moved to Paris where he began studying history, then cinema, at the University of Saint-Denis.

At the same time, he learns analogue photography in a self-taught way. He quickly stopped his studies to devote himself to photography, and became a "minutero" on the Beaubourg square. For ten years, he earns his living by taking portraits of passers-by with a large format camera, developing his photos directly on the spot with a mobile darkroom.

In 2014 he left for Brittany where he learned sailing, then embarked on a long journey that lasted two years, from which a book, 2MISSISSIPPI, was published by Le Mulet (2019).

In 2022, he was selected as laureate of the great photographic commission initiated by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France for his project Crossings, which documents the ferry journeys between Marseille and the Maghreb countries.

Today he lives in Marseille and continues to use exclusively the same camera, a late 19th century camera, to carry out his documentary projects.