Cuny Janssen - There is Something in the Air in Prince Albert

Photographs of a deserted cosmos in a beautifully printed and elaborately designed book this is the fourth title from the young Dutch photographer Cuny Jansen. Her photographs recall the work of Wolfgang Tillmans in a very personal diary (of a place). Cuny Jansen travels frequently to Prince Albert, South Africa, to the middle of the Great Karoo an ancient seabed formed millions of years ago. It is this severe dry landscape that Jansen explores with her camera and upon which she projects stark portraits of local young people. Indeed it is the balance between fresh, young lives and unspoiled and harsh nature that lends this body of work a highly contemplative feel. The essay by Craig McEwan is a poem, an elegy for the archaic land written in geological time.