Every metropolis has its personal emotional and sensory character – and but, regardless of the landmarks that make cities legible to us, they typically stay mysterious, shifting landscapes.
It was life in massive cities that first drew photographer Sarah van Rij to choose up a digital camera. “I’ve always been fascinated by their rhythms, contradictions, and the human stories within them – beauty, solitude, dreams, melancholy, chance. From early on, I wanted to elevate those street moments into something more cinematic, to find the scenes that already felt staged within everyday life.” She doesn’t assume consciously when it comes to psychogeography, however it undoubtedly provides a perspective on her artworks. “My work connects to the emotional and atmospheric impact of the place. When I walk through a city, I’m drawn both to how spaces look and to how they feel – how architecture, light or weather can shift the tone of a moment.”
She might shoot on the streets however she’s not a road photographer within the typical sense. Rij describes her new ebook, Atlas of Echoes, as “a map of my visual universe, images created over seven years, from many places, forming a poetic, parallel reflection of the world as I perceive it”. Her visions of road life are ingeniously composed vignettes that use shadows, thresholds, reflections, motion and strange crops and views to disrupt our understanding of what we’re seeing and elevate these on a regular basis scenes into one thing surreal and cinematic.
“I’ve always perceived the world through a slightly surreal lens, as if another, dreamlike universe exists alongside the real one,” she says. “For me, it’s less about surrealism as an art movement than about a way of seeing, finding the uncanny or dreamlike within the ordinary. My images often balance between those two layers of perception.”
Her sense of composition comes from the silver display screen; alongside portray, cinema is her greatest affect. There’s a heightened sense of thriller and drama about her work that remembers Hitchcock, Godard, Germaine Dulac and movie noir. “Everything within a frame contributes to the story: colour, light, a corner, a gesture – each element carries meaning, just as in cinema. My mother used to show us arthouse films and old classics when I was a teenager, and that experience shaped the way I now see; in scenes and fragments.”
During lockdown, Rij’s work took a change of course. Her gaze turned away from the lifetime of the streets and in the direction of her home area. She started taking pictures nonetheless lifes out of necessity, however this has now grow to be a vital part of her follow. Later, throughout a time of “personal and artistic transition”, she started incorporating self-portraits and handmade collages into her work. “The self-portraits were a way to face myself, while the collages helped me process a more fragmented inner world,” she says. “I printed hundreds of photographs, laid them out on the floor, and began cutting and recombining fragments into new stories, a form of reinterpretation and recycling that transformed past work into something renewed. The physical act of cutting, layering, and building a one-of-one piece carries deep meaning for me.”
As properly as recalling a deeply surrealist follow, collage additionally brings us again, in a suitably meandering full circle, to psychogeography and the exploration of cities. “I’m fascinated by the layers of time embedded in a place, its history, its ruins, the silent traces of what once was. Those layers shape the atmosphere I try to capture: the sense that the present always carries echoes of the past. My photographs often emerge from that intuitive dialogue between place, memory and time.”
Atlas of Echoes by Sarah van Rij is revealed by Note Note Éditions and is out now.
