Sarah van Rij and David van der Leeuw are one of those art-making couples in the manner of Christo and Jeanne-Claude or Gilbert & George, one whose brains work, as van Rij puts it, “in the same visual universe.” Under their shared byline, they’ve made short films and published a book of New York pandemic photographs called Metropolitan Melancholia. So it’s a little unexpected to see van Rij’s name alone on her new book, Atlas of Echoes (Note Note Éditions). Are they, you know, okay? “Absolutely,” van Rij says with a little laugh when we get on the phone. “He’s sitting right next to me here.” This is merely a set of pictures that came more from her half of the hive mind. “We make a lot of work together, but we do carry our own cameras and, within that shared universe, really operate as individuals. It may sound strange to people from afar, but for us that really does make a difference — whether I shoot a photo by myself. In small ways, we try to find our own individual work, which is also healthy, I think, and nice to do.”
A signature of theirs has often been the multilayered image, sometimes dependent on reflections in windows or water, other times based more on compressing three-dimensional space into the frame (say, a subject caught behind a window grille or railing). That quality is as present as ever here, and lately van Rij has started making collages out of her photographs, so the images containing multiple layers are themselves laid atop one another. “Recycling and constructing” is how she puts it. (It also is a part of her artistic practice that’s all her own: “David does not make collages.”) Especially in cities, places of eternal construction and reconstruction, where the past and present overlap, giving you glimpses of “the times that have come before, which you can still sort of feel around the corner.”
