Dimensions
245 x 303 x 15mm
Ferdinando Scianna has always been fascinated by the sight of figures wrapped in sleep. Fascination became a minor obsession, and over some thirty years Scianna has captured thousands of images of people and animals sleeping in the most diverse places on earth: in the countryside, in cities, in deserts, on street corners, in moving trains, in their own homes.
With this collection of black-and-white photographs, interspersed with an anthology of evocative quotations about sleep and dreaming, Scianna takes us and himself on a fascinating journey inside a dimension of life that is natural and mysterious, necessary and disturbing, everyday and universal. Often the camera freezes movement, isolating a single movement in the endless flux of reality; here, on the contrary, the stillness of the image is of its essence. Through the mystery of sleep, life itself, like the photographic image, becomes static, as if in suspense.
Ferdinando Scianna is known internationally as a photojournalist, and is member of Magnum. 'To Sleep, Perchance to Dream' is his first book to be published in English.
