Atlas of Echoes, published by Note Note Éditions is the first monograph by Sarah van Rij. Van Rij, self-taught photographer living and working between Amsterdam and Paris, began photographing in 2018, initially drawn to the immediacy of the street. She then expanded her practice to landscapes, still life, portraiture, and, more recently, collage, developing a visual language always moving with delicacy between the real and the dreamlike. The book is a selection of works created over the past seven years: street photographs, still life, self-portraits, and her handmade collages, composed from her own images. Over the last year and a half, collage has become an essential extension of her practice, a process of layering and reassembling images captured in different places around the world that allows new visual narratives to emerge.
The release of her first monograph, coincides with her first two solo museum exhibitions: at Deichtorhallen in Hamburg (on view from October 31st to january 4th) and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris (on view until January 25th).
Across all these forms, van Rij seeks quiet, poetic stories hidden within the everyday. Her images, whether captured with a camera or an iPhone, echo one another through recurring shapes such as hands, profiles, shoes, or traffic lights, forming a constellation of visual clues. Atlas of Echoes, which includes an analytical and playful index and an essay written by the MEP’s curator, offers the first map of van Rij s evolving, imaginative world.
