With this collection of photographs, interspersed with an anthology of quotations about sleeping and dreaming, Scianna takes us and himself on a journey inside a dimension of life that is natural and mysterious, necessary and distrubing, every-day and universal. Often the camera freezes movement, isolating a single moment in the endless flux of reality. Through the mystery of sleep, life itself, like the photographic image, becomes static, as if in suspense. Ferdinando Scianna has always been fascinated by the sight of figures wrapped in sleep. As he recounts "...I realized just how many of my pictures were of sleeping people, and that I had always been taking such pictures ever since I started photography, wherever the chances of life and of my job had led me." Fascination became a minor obsession, and over 30 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, and in their own homes.
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In travelling the world to photograph his favorite type of image, Magnum photographer Ferdinando Scianna seems to have had little chance to do much sleeping of his own. Over the course of three decades, he has snapped thousands of images of sleepers--a Balinese farmer in her fields, a napper on a rocky crag in Bolivia, a dog in the shade of a laundry line in Egypt, a barefoot man along an Italian pier, an infant on a woman's lap in India. Looking at the faces of all these sleeping people--rich and poor, young and old, comfortably ensconced in beds and arranged awkwardly on the ground--one can't help but wonder where their dreams transport them.
Scianno's rich black and white images are reproduced in warm sepia tones alongside aphorisms and phrases about sleep penned by such writers as Ernest Hemingway, Dante, Edgar Allen Poe, and Christina Rosetti. One phrase in Sir Philip Sydney seems to capture the spirit of the collection:
Come, Sleep! Oh Sleep, the certain knot of peace, The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe, The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release, The indifferent judge between the high and low.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not as good as he gets,
By A Customer
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This review is from: To Sleep, Perchance to Dream (Hardcover)
Scianna is a wonderful documentary photographer who has produced phenomenal photographs. Unfortunately, his first book readily available outside of his native Italy is this coffee table piece. His book of Religious Festivals in Sicily is truly phenomenal, abundant with transcendent photographs, giving a real feel for his subject. This book has beautiful photographs, but goes nowhere.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Scianna's photographs make the world seem beautiful,
By A Customer
This review is from: To Sleep, Perchance to Dream (Hardcover)
Ferdinando Scianna's photography book "To Sleep, Perchance to Dream" is amazing. Its a beautiful collection of photographs of people and animals from all over the world that captures the mystery and beauty of sleep.
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