New York Enigma

Dutch photographers and couple Sarah van Rij and David Van Der Leeuw create dreamlike worlds within the artistic traditions of surrealism, yet in a style undeniably their own. Elegant and cinematic, their imagery conveys an understated sense of mystery.

Their images exhibit an anamorphic, collage-like quality, often achieved by capturing objects distorted in reflective surfaces or by incorporating their own shadows to obscure or warp a scene. They are drawn to the visual density of big cities in their work and have recently published two books—one a personal project focused on New York, and the other a commission for Louis Vuitton featuring images taken in Seoul.

The photos presented here were captured in New York in December 2024 and created using only in-camera effects.

“In our street photography, we don’t just point and click,” David explains. “We try to create something different—something that highlights the surreal qualities of life.”

For Sarah and David, photography is about mood and leaving room for the viewer’s imagination. “When I started,” Sarah notes, “I was super into color, and I still am. Color can really set a mood,” she adds, explaining that, for her, art is “when I enter a room and I'm drawn to it because of a color, a shape, or a face.”

What makes their images interesting goes beyond gear and equipment. “It’s definitely not technical for us,” David points out. “We never apply tricks,” Sarah observes, adding, “Some people think we make double exposures, but we never do—all our photographs are in-camera.”

"A lot of our images are totally unplanned," David says. For the work created with the Sigma BF camera, they went out in New York, staying close to each other but not photographing exactly in the same spots. At the end of the day, they looked at the images they had taken, made selections and pieced everything together.  

New York is a city they know well and keep coming back to, having lived there for six months spread out over two years. Their latest book, Metropolitan Melancholia, came out of their stay in the city. "We feel very at home here," David says, adding, "New York has a lot of art direction in the city. The colors are very beautiful."

"It's a unique city where so many people have arrived to start a new life and become American or a New Yorker," Sarah says. That sentiment, Sarah observes, "offers a very interesting feeling for us."

An element of New York that is essential to Sarah and David's photographic approach is the city's cinematic quality. They both love film and cite Alfred Hitchcock, John Cassavetes, Roman Polanski, and Michelangelo Antonioni as a few of their many influences. Their work is infused with this obsession, evident in its ability to tell a story within a single image.

Sarah and David are self-taught image-makers. "Neither of us attended a proper photography or art school," Sarah says. "We both have our own paths into it."

As a child, Sarah was surrounded by film and cinema. Her mother made sure she was exposed to the classics. David grew up in an art-filled home with a father who was a painter.

Both are kids of the ’90s and early 2000s, a time of rapid change, with the rise of the digital era and increasing access to imagery through Tumblr and Flickr. That period "was a really important point for me," Sarah says. It was then that she began to find her place in the visual world. "We got our first little phones with cameras, and I would always capture everything around me."