Cuny Janssen: BLU

So BLU

Anyone who has ever been to Naples is captivated by the beauty of this city: the view from the Museo Nazionale di Copodimonte over the Gulf of Naples, Capri and Ischia; the historic city centre with its fortifications and winding streets; or the famous Botanical Gardens. BLU, Cuny Janssen's new project, for which she is now presenting a book that is both enchantingly beautiful and stirring, and which documents her travels from April 2012 to October 2013, is of course also about light, the different shades of blue that symbolise the sensual experience of this modern city of millions, which has been attracting visitors since the Middle Ages. The blue of the sky there, azzurro, turquoise, ultramarine, cobalt or indigo, already seduced Goethe in March 1787 to remark that Naples was the "most pleasant part of the journey". And Cuny Janssen takes us into the world of children with her pictures, which of course also deal with the beauty of such a place, as she always does in her projects. In this book, too, she approaches her subject from the outside and searches for a kind of psychological state in the portraits of the children; for this ability, Freddy Langer declared her "the most remarkable photographer of children in our time" in the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" in 2010. The book is therefore unexpectedly disturbing, as it not only depicts the children and young people of the Italian middle class, but also presents us with photos of Roma children, whose ghettoised lives in poverty and filth are clearly visible. This creates a suspenseful arc to the everlasting image of this breathtaking city, which is also home to a human misery that is hard to imagine. Cuny Janssen has also had this experience, as she tells Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, the author of the book. During her second photo shoot of Roma children, they remembered the photographer and asked when school would finally start for them too; they had seen Cuny Janssen as a social worker who was photographing them for the start of school. Thus the dilemma of all documentary photography, indeed all travel, becomes visible, and the empathy at the centre of this unusual photo book BLU unexpectedly envelops us.