Lise Sarfati: The New Life - (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

"Sarfati's (born 1958) work is defined through an opposition to the editorial urge to fix narratives to her subjects. Her images create a loose, layered and intensely rich visual project triggering emotions and thoughts that move well beyond her ostensible subjects. Sarfati's importance in today's debates about the role and visual languages of socially engaged photography also rests in her resistance to fully objectify the subjects that compel her to make imagery. The American Series represents one of those rare experiences for photographers where the photographs almost--just--happened. Sarfati did not overly choreograph her subjects; she also created the psychological space for them, in turn, to act upon her and to act up--or down--for the camera. This perhaps accounts for Sarfati's success in re-presenting American young people as simply, individually and universally the carriers of states of minds." --Clare Grafik, Photographers Gallery, London

Review Quotes

In each of these portraits, Lise Sarfati dramatizes the complexity of adolescent identity; within unfamiliar territory-both emotionally and physically-where the simplest of feelings become exalted and everything is lived with an intensity that adults will never again be able to feel. We are talking here of a kind of parallel reality, an interstitial territory which doesn't understand geographical spaces or political systems, which no longer belongs either to a completely real reality or to a consciously conceived fiction, but rather finds itself fed by its own rituals and codes of behaviour, where the dividing line between good and bad, happiness and sadness, innocence and perversity or reality and fantasy is extensively blurred.