David Jazay
is a photographer and award-winning film maker whose photographic work focuses on our changing urban and rural environment.
David studied Journalism and Documentary Filmmaking at the renowned HFF München (Munich Film School) and at NSFTV, Leeds, UK (post-graduate), with teachers and lecturers including Ken Loach, Richard Leacock and Bela Tarr.
As a photographer, David Jazay’s work is based around the notion of recreating psychogeographical space and time. History, and our memory of it.
Most of his work is long-term, honouring, revisiting and reassessing the desire paths created by life itself: “A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.” (A. Camus).
After graduating from HFF Munich Film School and postgraduate studies at NSFTV, Leeds, UK, David went on to direct feature films and documentaries, among them the 1998 award-winning vampire drama “Kiss My Blood” (set in the post-reunification Berlin club scene), which drew comparisons to Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, and, in 2005, “Fliegende Ratten – Rats With Wings”, which was nominated for Best German Picture at Munich Film Festival 2006 and encapsulates the marginalised lives of the urban sub-proletariat in his Berlin-Kreuzberg neighbourhood before the influx of tourism and gentrification.
His 1988 documentary “Bargaintown: Dublin, Liffey Quays” documents the Irish capital in an era coming to a close. The lives and opinions of a vanishing generation of Dubliners are given voice through long interview sequences which contrast with architectural shots in “luminous black and white” (Cork Film Festival), in this “…poetic meditation on urban decay” (Irish Film Institute).
A newly restored version of “Bargaintown” was screened to public and critical acclaim as part of the IFI Docfest in September 2015, with support from the Goethe Institut Irland.
Jazay continues working on long-term photographic studies of urban and rural environments in Ireland, Morocco, London, Berlin, and the former mining towns of Sardinia.
For panoramic, or large-scale architectural work, he has developed a unique system in which multiple medium-format negatives are composited, yielding a final high-resolution image.