A clever operation by Sam Contis, Day Sleeper presents a new window into the work of iconic American photographer Dorothea Lange, who is shown here with incredibly fresh and contemporary images.
Drawing on Lange’s extensive archive, Contis builds a dreamlike world, fragmentary and unknown, centered on the archetypal figure of “he who sleeps by day,” a symbol at once of reprieve and oblivion.
At the same time, it shows us a side of Lange that has remained largely unknown, including unpublished photographs of her family, portraits in her studio and images taken on the streets of San Francisco and the East Bay. The book is a continuous oscillation between Contis’s way of seeing and Lange’s way of seeing; it is an endless chase between the showing of one artist through the eyes of the other and vice versa, a path of continuous discovery from which neither of the two will come out the winner, nor the vanquished.
