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Sandra Hays

@sd.hays

Landscape photographer based in France

I’m daydreamer, this is how I was defined… It all starts with an extremely sensitive and dreamy little girl. This little dreamer is me, Sandra, wife and mother filled with happiness. I live in the south-east of France, in Provence, and I have my origins in Italy. I spent my childhood in a small village in the French Alps where I was born, and I have therefore always kept an immense love for the great natural spaces. I need nature so much that it is entirely tattooed on my body. I can’t really say where my desire for travel comes from, as long as I can remember I always dreamed of traveling, of discovering the world. As a child I thought that I would become a great adventurer who would leave in search of missing worlds like Indiana Jones.

"But I think that the book "Around the World in 80 Days" by Jules Verne has a lot to do with it."

My passion for photography goes back to the 80s. As a child I always liked photography, I played to put my hands in the shape of a camera and looking at the world through it. I spent hours looking at family albums and looking for every detail that made a photo unique. As a teenager passionate about cinema, I devoured the films of Spielberg, Kubrick or Carpenter. My dream of having a camera started like this, but it was years later that I was able to afford my very first camera and I was frustrated that no one understood my passion.

"My husband and my children were the ones pushing me to develop my creativity, encouraging me to express myself after my grandmother passed away."
"As an extremely sensitive and anxious person, photography is my only form of expression."

I find expressing my feelings in words difficult, but photography allows me to illustrate my sensitivity and my feelings. Photography is in a way a daily therapy, just like music. Being very sensitive, photography allows me to show as faithfully as possible who I really am without being afraid. Photography forces me to exceed my limits and influences positively my self-confidence.

Photography is an integral part of my life now, although I am not a professional photographer. When I don’t take photos, I am on my computer doing post production, or on the Internet in constant search of learning. I constantly consult classes online, I try to understand the different techniques, and I speak with other photographers from all countries. Learning is the driving force in my life. A day without learning something is a lost day, so this is what motivates me. I think that perfection doesn’t exist and that there’s always someone who can teach us and thus make us evolve again and again. 

When I edit a photo, I expect above all to relive the emotion I had while taking it. It’s essential; if a photo doesn’t speak to me, I don’t publish it. Behind each photo hides my story, my emotion, my feeling that I need to convey visually. I have a particular universe, rather dark and foggy and I like to accentuate this particularity. I guess that is because as a child I early dove into literature, which is a passion of mine as well.

Sandra Hays
My bedside book was "the tales of Perrault"; I was fascinated by this fairytale and the dark universe at the same time. For me, it’s in the dark that I find the light. I'm always looking for misty atmospheres (I’ve an aversion for clear blue sky and shiny sun) and I’m in love with fog - everything is so different in the fog…
Meet Sandra Hays

In the end, I want others to understand me through my photos, to see my vision of the world. I would like them to escape to dream a little. To maximize my art and the understanding, I love adding titles or descriptions to my photos.

"When I am in nature, generally at sunrise, it's all a poem for me."

I close my eyes, I breathe the freshness, I feel the dew on my face, I listen to nature waking up, my heart sinks and a new story begins. It’s like starting a new book that I absolutely want to read. I let myself be guided by emotions, I walk step by step and I immortalize with my camera a moment that particularly touched me. In a photobook I will immortalize how I read the world, applying a sentence or a quote to the photograph.

My favorite quote is the one in my bio: “The love that moves the sun and the other stars.” This quote is taken from Dante’s book that I always have with me “The divine comedy”. It’s close to my heart because my biggest dream was to visit Venice and during my first trip I made the inevitable gondola ride. On the wood was written “The Love that moves the sun and the other stars”.

"My grandmother always taught me that with love, you can move mountains, love does miracles."

My grandmother called me her sun and when she died I called her my star, she shines and watches over me now. This is why this quote speaks to me; love because it’s the value that I carry, the sun that I represented for my grandma and the stars because my grandparents shine for me now, every night. My grandparents had a primordial place in my life, it was them who raised me and instilled values ​​of love in me. As a kid, I thought my grandparents were immortal. If I could go back in time, I would photograph them, immortalizing them. 

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"Photography allowed me to open my eyes to the world and traveling allowed me to open my eyes to myself."

To photograph the world is to discover a place in its smallest details (not the tourist spots), it is to meet the population and to build relationships with locals, to learn new cultures, new languages, and it is to care about the conditions of our planet. Thanks to photography I have very beautiful friendships which are very precious to me. Now that my children are teenagers, we decided to start traveling, not as tourists, but as explorers. In our opinion, traveling opens the mind: They learn a thousand times more by discovering the world than on school benches.

"We wish to transmit to them the values of respect for other cultures and our planet, and of course photographing the world with their own eyes."
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