• Port Yarin
  • Port Yarin
  • Port Yarin
  • Port Yarin
  • Port Yarin
  • Port Yarin
  • Port Yarin

Port Yarin

A book by photographer Jeff Hahn
February 2017

  • Rob and Nicholas are two good friends of mine and I’m super grateful that they allow me to photograph them in their intimacy. This book was never meant to have any political undertones but I remember looking at this image a few months ago, in the height of the disarray that was/is Orlando, Trump and Brexit, and thinking how much this image resonated with those topics of ethnicity, sexuality, and belonging. 


  • I’m quite hard on myself and am constantly doubting myself and my abilities. I had three attempts at starting this project and all the results disappointed me. This image was the first image I made that set the tone for the rest of the book and made me realise what it was about, and what I wanted from it. Thank you to the wonderful model Catriona who made it possible – her beauty is just astounding.

  • Yossi might be the first person I’ve ever casted off Instagram. Photographing strangers sounds great but in theory it’s often quite an awkward process, especially when there’s a language barrier in a foreign country. I think it was also his first time being photographed. We walked outside of his apartment in Ramat Aviv to a stretch of land by the sea and took images whilst the sun set. There’s such a loneliness to this area for me – little clusters of new builds against a desolate landscape, with nothing nearby.

  • I had spent a few days in the Masada desert in Israel and in Wadi Rum in Jordan photographing the landscapes before realising the images weren’t really what I wanted to do for this project. I realised this fictional place to me was less of a desert landscape and more of a forgotten, quiet little town. I only spent about a half day in Tel Aviv just capturing what I saw, and ended up using nearly all those pictures and none from the desert. This building is in the Florentine neighborhood.

  • Photographing Bjorn was like a flirtatious dance between voyeurism and intimacy, it was natural and strange all at once. I took this portrait about 5 years ago and managed to rescue it from a severely underexposed scan. This book is dedicated to Bjorn, his beauty and his weirdness.

  • I took this blurry landscape from the car window somewhere in Langkawi, Malaysia, probably about a decade ago. I’d never published this image anywhere before and am surprised I still remembered it existed.

  • Asaf is an artist I knew forever ago (maybe 15 years?) from a website called deviantArt. I used to spend hours after school on deviantArt sharing work with other budding artists. We’d never met before until this trip – he’s super camera-shy and wouldn’t let me photograph his face so I had to make do with his back. I love anonymity so it was a happy compromise.
Port Yarin is a fictional town that’s meant to serve as a home to third culture kids, the racially ambiguous – and anyone who’s never had a specific place they could call home. It’s a vision of the future face of tomorrow – freckles clustered like galaxies, olive skinned, dark haired and broody eyed – gazing at the blood orange sun setting over a forgotten dust covered town, flickering neon lights, distant cities in the horizon. I worked on this project over the course of about a year – on and off, giving up and  eventually finding inspiration again. I began by photographing friends, and then casted models, strangers and lovers initially in London, and then around the world. For the landscapes and cityscapes, I travelled specifically to Jordan and Israel to capture the images and also used some images from my archive. I wanted to collate fragments of different places I had been to, to create this patchwork town, somewhat difficult to place geographically, neither West nor East.   Port Yarin is available at https://www.arcanabooks.com and http://jeff-hahn.com/BOOKS