Cuny Janssen: There Was a Child Went Forth.

"This book is different from the previous projects"

The famous poem by Walt Whitman (1819-1892) utilises the imaginary world of the child, although its elegantly swinging lines also disillusion the reader. Cuny Janssen, the "most remarkable photographer of children in our time" (Freddy Langer), depicts the intermediate state in which naivety gives way to experience in an inimitable way in her latest three-part photo essay with nature shots and portraits of Amsterdam children. Surprisingly, the images of nature from parks and park-like residential areas do not really contrast with the fantastic realism of the children's pictures - the whole book's imagery seems like one big dream: bushes in colourful autumn foliage, serious children's faces playing in the meadow, lazing and reading on the sofa, equipped with research equipment or at a theatre performance at school. As in Cuny Janssen's earlier works, the portraits here never seem to have been conceived with a particular moment in mind; rather, they appear to be stills, frozen images from a film that is about to continue. As before, the artist thus succeeds in leaving distance and proximity to her and our subjects in a suspenseful limbo - even though, as Cuny Janssen says, this book was different from her previous projects in that the images were created in her immediate surroundings and do not originate from other worlds and cultures. With "There Was a Child Went Forth.", the sixth volume in the now ten-year collaboration between the artist and publisher is now being published as another very high-quality photo book.