About Daniel Bay

I was born in either the 1980s or the 1990s.

I'm something of a lone wolf.

I mainly shoot street photography, and when I do fashion photography, it’s usually in the streets or in public dumps and scrapyards.

I live in Paris, but I hate photographing Paris. I’d rather venture into places where other photographers never go.

I try to create cinematic images using the street as my only raw material.

My photographs are like paintings or scenes from a film.

I never plan anything. I simply buy a plane ticket, arrive in a city, and wander around more or less at random. The only places I deliberately seek out are the ones people have warned me to avoid.

I’m not influenced by other photographers. I’m trying to carve out my own path and develop my own visual language. My culture is not photographic—it is musical (rap, soul, funk, reggae, Afrobeat, trip-hop, pop, Latin music, French chanson, and classical music), literary (Céline, Calaferte, Hemingway, Huysmans, Poe, Ellis, Despentes, Dostoevsky, Fante), and cinematic (Kurosawa, Peckinpah, Cassavetes, Haneke, Herzog, Iñárritu, De Palma, Polanski, Lynch, Scorsese, P. T. Anderson, Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, Fincher, Audiard, Noé, Woo, Wong Kar-wai…).

I will never become a specialist in the history of photography, because I want to remain free to create what I feel—according to my own definition of what is cool: never following trends, but always moving in the right direction.