Eve Sonneman is one of the most renowned American photographers, known for her singular technique of pairing stills taken seconds apart and presenting them side-by-side. Her career was launched at the Young Photographers exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1971. Since then, she has continued to explore photography with an insightful talent, always observing on the tiny, delicate changes occurring in a split second.

Whether capturing landscapes, portraits or still lives, Sonneman brings to our attention a fleeting and delicate passage of time. However brief, this gap demands interpretation, just as a film is understood as a series of events, rather than a sequence of stills. With an absolute delicacy, she studies the details of our social rituals and cultural celebrations. Nearing the grounds of visual anthropology, she captures the beauty of these moments and compiles them into a portfolio of social landscape.

Until 1974, Sonneman worked exclusively with black and white stories, also printed in pairs. After that, she adopted a more cinematic approach starting with her “Coney Island” series. Using both black and white and color, she paired two sets of photographs with a shorter time span between them. In the past several years, she has begun working with color digital techniques, exploring human interactions and the changes in social communication.
As she presents the viewer with sequence stories of people engaged in leisure activities, the artist explores the notion of the landscape as witness to this passage of time. Sonneman’s advances in photography are developed and adapt to the technology and conceptual worries of our contemporary world. Her work is of an unaffected technique; touched by a fluidity and expression above all presumptions, she achieves the complete visual experience.

Eve Sonneman was born in Chicago, IL in 1946. She has exhibited worldwide and received numerous grants. She participated in the 1977 Documenta and in the biennales of Venice, Paris, Strasbourg and Australia.  Her work is represented in forty-three museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Texas; Editions of Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; among others. She has published seven books, the most recent being La Ville Écrite by Éditions du Centre Pompidou. Sonneman currently lives and works in New York City