Privacy Settings

Privacy Settings is a sequence of black-and-white photographs of Erik van der Weijde's sleeping son, the boy cast about the bed in different positions across the book, occasionally joined by his sleeping mother. The premise, a parent obsessively photographing a child in sleep, courts unease, but the images themselves read as light and tender: a boy cuddling a bear, cocooned in a blanket, growing progressively more off-kilter as the sequence continues. The son is never named, yet the photographs place the viewer intimately inside his private, unconscious world, invoking the same domesticity and vulnerability found in Sophie Calle's The Sleepers and Fred Hüning's Private Rooms. Sleep recurs across van der Weijde's practice, appearing in titles such as This is Not My Wife and This is Not My Son, and later a series photographing his sleeping dog, Nina; Privacy Settings sits in the middle of that thread. Bound in cloth, sewn, and offset printed, the book was published by 4478zine in an edition of 700.