Cuny Janssen: There Was a Child Went Forth

This book is different from my previous projects The famous poem by Walt Whitman (1819-1892) not only makes use of the imaginative world of children, but its elegantly sweeping lines have quite a sobering effect on the reader. Cuny Janssen, the most remarkable photographer of children in our time (Freddy Langer), presents in her latest, three-part photo-essay of nature photographs as well as portraits of Amsterdam children; she shows in an inimitable way the intermediate state where naivete is lost and gives way to knowledge. The natural images of parks and park-like neighborhoods do, surprisingly, not form a true contrast to the fantastic realism of the children’s images–overall the images in the book seem like one big dream: bushes in colorful autumn colors, stern children’s faces while playing in the fields, while lazing and reading on the sofa, equipped with research equipment or at a theater performance at school. As in Janssen’s earlier works, her portraits never seem to be conceived with a particular moment in mind, but rather appear like stills, as frozen images from a movie, which will continue instantly. In this way, the artist, as ever, is able to keep distance and closeness to her and our objects in floating suspense–and this, even though, as Cuny Janssen says, this book was different from her previous projects, insofar as the images are captured in her immediate environment, rather than from other worlds and cultures. There Was a Child Went Forth as a very high-quality photo book is the sixth volume in the ten-year collaboration between artist and publisher.