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A collage of New York and Florence, 2025.
Photo: Sarah van Rij

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.”

New York, 2022.
Photo: Sarah van Rij

New York, 2025.
Photo: Sarah van Rij

She pretty clearly loves a partial portrait, a disembodied hand or an ear or a pair of feet. In one of these photographs, two ladies stand waiting for a Paris bus, one in white flats, one in black heels; we see just their feet and lower legs, one pair between the other. “I was just passing by, real quick, and I saw this weird sort of legs-in-leg effect. Sometimes I take a bit more time or a wait on the spot, but this was really, like, Okay, wow,” and she just got down low and fired the shutter. (Shooting waist-high is a habit of hers; the picture is, she remarks, a little reminiscent of photos made with old-school Rolleiflex twin-lens-reflex cameras, the kind you look down into with the viewfinder flat on top.) All of this fragmentation — of people, of images, of physical photographs cut into collages — is, she suggests, central to her artistic thinking: “A big part of my work, or my interest at least, has a lot to do with the way you dream. If you have a memory, it’s always in short fragments and it’s not very logical or chronological. And in the book, for me, it’s a bit like a dream sequence.”