Cuny JanssenThere Was a Child Went Forth.

“With this book it is different from the previous projects,” says Cuny Janssen. The famous poem by Walt Whitman (1819–1892) draws on the imaginative world of the child, its elegantly swinging lines also bringing a certain sobriety to the reader. In her latest photo essay, constructed in three parts, with nature photographs as well as portraits of Amsterdam children, Cuny Janssen – “the most remarkable photographer of children of our time” (Freddy Langer in FAZ – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) – depicts in inimitable fashion that intermediate state in which naivety gives way to experience. Surprisingly, the nature pictures from parks and park-like residential areas form no real contrast to the fantastical realism of the pictures of children – the entire visual action of the book has the effect of one great dream: shrubs in colourful autumn regalia, serious children’s faces at play on the grass, lazing and reading on the sofa, kitted out with explorer’s equipment or performing in a school play. As in Cuny Janssen’s earlier work, here too the portraits never seem conceived with the special moment in mind; rather they appear merely as stills, as frozen images from a film that is about to run on. In this way the artist succeeds, as before, in holding distance from and closeness to her subjects and ours in a state of charged suspension – and this even though, as Cuny Janssen says, with this book things were different from her previous projects, in so far as the pictures were taken in her immediate surroundings and do not come from other worlds and cultures. With “There Was a Child Went Forth.”, once again a photo book of the highest production quality, the sixth volume now appears in a collaboration between artist and publisher that has meanwhile lasted ten years.