Cuny Janssen
I’m always looking for what lies beneath that facade, that knowledge we have about a country or a culture…Being there and having a real person in front of you: one who cries and laughs, and who actually has the same feelings, yet looks different and lives in an entirely different situation. That I find fascinating.
Children have been the most significant theme in Cuny Janssen’s (1975, the Netherlands) work. After having graduated, she travelled to India in order to make portraits of children from various levels of society. After this trip she visited Macedonia, Iran, South Africa, Japan and Oklahoma. These separate series of photographs are part of a larger investigative project in which Janssen wishes to compare portraits of children from all over the world.
In her endeavor to find a distinctly individual quality, Janssen often ends up seeking the things that children have in common. In her portraits, the uninhibited nature of a gaze and the naturalness of a stance or gesture show us what makes a child a child, regardless of his or her specific origins. With her photographs she attempts to arrive at that vital essence. Her work is an ode to life itself.
