Atlas Of Echoes by Sarah van Rij at MEP

The Studio of MEP welcomes the photographic project by artist Sarah van Rij, who offers a unique vision of the street, somewhere between documentary observation and poetic construction.

Overview

The exhibition presents a selection of series created by Sarah van Rij during her wanderings through major metropolises. Combining urban landscapes, self-portraits, and collages, the artist paints a poetic portrait of the modern city: fragmented, enigmatic, and driven by a cinematic rhythm. Through her lens, passers-by become characters in an urban theatre; silhouettes framed through windows, cast shadows, or fleeting details of hands and clothing captured in motion.

This visual approach, positioned at the crossroads of street photography and cinematic aesthetics, transforms the ordinary into a sensitive stage. Each image conveys the intensity of a fleeting moment, revealing how chance, the rhythm of the crowd, and light come together to compose fragmentary narratives.

Sarah van Rij also creates collages exclusively from her own photographs, as a way of recycling her work and extending her visual explorations beyond the act of shooting.

With this keen attention to the invisible signs of everyday life, Sarah van Rij questions the very act of looking: What do we really see when we wander through the streets? What do the gestures of others, reflections, tell us? Her photographs open up a space for projection and daydreaming, where contemplation and imagination intertwine.

About The Artist

Sarah van Rij, (born 1990 in the Netherlands) lives and works in Amsterdam. A self-taught artist, she began her journey in 2018 with street photography, gradually expanding her practice to include landscape, still life, portraiture, and more recently, collage. Her work is characterised by an acute sensitivity to detail and atmosphere. In parallel, she works in editorial contexts, with her personal and commissioned projects featured in international publications such as The New York Times, M Le Monde, i-D, and Vogue Italia, and exhibited in various institutions and festivals across Europe. Notably, she was selected for Foam First Editions in 2019. Her work will soon be shown in solo exhibitions at the Chiba Prefectural Museum of Art (Japan, 2025) and PHOXXI at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg (2025).

While she does not define herself as a fashion photographer, Sarah van Rij is regularly commissioned to bring her unique perspective to projects in the creative and luxury sectors.