I am fully aware that there is nothing original in my work.
As Jim Jarmusch put it so well in words, I devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Anything that speaks to my soul.
I always carry a little compact camera in my pocket. Images come to me and ask that I take them home. I arrange them inside hundreds of little boxes and let them grow old in the dark, like bottles of wine. And I forget them there.
Once in a while, suddenly, a certain feeling takes over me, triggered by a dream or a line in a book or by something I hear on the radio or see on the tv…
I let it slowly crystallize, first in a word, then, in a story that screams out to be told.
I go back to my boxes and start looking inside and pick up some of those forgotten images captured in so many different places and at so many different moments.. I know that their time has come to see the light. They finally fall well together now, like the pieces of a puzzle. The puzzle of my life.
Such a true story is the “Labyrinth”, which I want to share with you.
My name is Dan Hayon. I’m a 65 years old self-taught photographer. I am Romanian and I live in Paris. I have a French passport but if you ask me what is my nationality? I wouldn’t really know.
