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Published in conjunction with an exhibition at Amsterdam’s Flatland Gallery, Ruud van Empel’s *Souvenir d’Intime / Still Life* brings together two related series concerned with memory, mortality, and the unstable boundary between observation and invention. Rather than serving as a broad retrospective, the book concentrates on a particular conjunction within Van Empel’s work: private recollection set against the historical language of vanitas.

*Souvenir d’Intime* follows Van Empel’s earlier *Souvenir* series, returning to childhood through collections of ordinary objects charged with nostalgia. The objects do not merely illustrate a personal history; assembled into dense pictorial groupings, they suggest how remembrance is constructed from fragments. In *Still Life*, the emphasis shifts toward vanitas, a tradition in which material abundance is shadowed by transience. Seen together, the two series connect individual memory with a longer visual meditation on time, possession, and disappearance.

Their apparent still-life coherence is deliberately deceptive. Van Empel did not photograph completed arrangements. He photographed the constituent elements separately and subsequently combined them into images that describe a reality of his own making. This method gives the work its distinctive tension: the pictures retain photography’s descriptive clarity while refusing the assumption that the scene ever existed before the camera. Past and present become not fixed subjects but materials available for reconstruction.

Issued by PhotoWorks International BV in 2016, the 76-page hardcover includes a text by Kees Verbeek. For a serious photobook collection, its significance lies in the focused pairing of two series that clarify Van Empel’s composite practice from complementary directions—one autobiographical, the other art-historical. The volume offers a concise study of how familiar objects, digitally reassembled, can carry both intimate associations and the symbolic weight of still-life tradition.