Susan kae Grant's Night Journey Refuses to Explain

Susan kae Grant's book "Night Journey" collects night photographs made around the territory of dreams. The pictures resist reading. They behave less like documentation than like the fragments left over after waking, and the book sets them side by side rather than explaining any of them.

There is an old trap here. A dream becomes a story the moment it is described, and stops being a dream in the process. Painters since the Surrealists tried to escape it by stacking symbols, usually producing images that are too legible. Photography works from the opposite direction: the camera always records something that was physically present, so even an incoherent scene arrives with an undeniable claim to having existed. Darkness does the rest, turning faces into silhouettes and rooms into open space, and leaving the viewer to fill the gaps from their own memory.