To Sleep' Perchance to Dream

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.