Susan kae Grant: Night Journey

A photo album from the unconscious—black-and-white tableaux populated by silhouetted, fantastical creatures For the last 25 years, American lens-based artist Susan kae Grant (born 1954) has created a cycle of photographs composed of dream imagery. In the early 1990s, Grant began collaborating with noted sleep researcher John Herman, interrogating her own hyperactive REM sleep through controlled awakenings designed to elicit descriptions of the dream space. The phrases that were coaxed from her unconscious mind seeded Night Journey with a visual vocabulary that continues to inform her work. The volume presents, through nearly 90 photographs and including six gatefold sections, a haunting shadow world made up of silhouetted figures and symbolic forms. Through arresting black-and-white tableaux populated by fantastical creatures, animals and children in hallucinatory settings, these photographs invite readers to traverse the strangeness and chaos of breakneck contemporary life and the dreams such a reality inspires.