The Velvet Cell continues to produce beautiful independent books for photography. They believe that the book is the most intimate way of interacting with photographs. It shows, as the quality and content of each book is fantastic. Their new release is stunning. Psychic Hearts by London based photographer Sandra Croft allows you to escape into a  hazy dream world, and that’s not by accident. Read on for an interview with Sandra, and a look at the pages of Psychic Hearts.

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Serial Optimist: What makes you take out your camera and press the shutter button?

Sandra Croft: I’m interested in the dreaminess that comes from a certain quality of light, and looking for these moments where imperfection and imbalance make for a perfect image. Usually it’s not a single feeling, but the overall stillness and isolation that emerges when you see the familiar from an unfamiliar perspective – a fleeting, delicate place that’s a mix or reality and fantasy. I’m always looking for that.

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SO: What is photography to you? 

Sandra: I use photography to both a means of communicating escapism with visual language and as a way to figure out what is meaningful to me about the experiences of life. I’m always dreaming of other places, a kind of ongoing escapism. In reality, there’s no escaping anything in life – even if you fly all the way to Thailand you’ll still find that person inside longing to escape. So I think I’ve created this realm in my photos where there can be an eternal escape from reality through any era and all places. There are never any intentions, plans, tactics, except for the opposite maybe: it just happens. The idea is to stop aiming and let intuition guide you to a place capable of transforming everyday existence into a something strange and romantic.

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SO: How does photography relate to other passions you have?

Sandra: It’s instilled in me a true sense of my own philosophical mobility – that I can stylistically move from one position to another, that I do not have to be true or faithful, or believe in any of the work as being an answer to anything. It’s always astonishing to me how artists make their breakthrough in our culture, how they impose their vision on the world. I work in music now, but in graduate school I was training to be a designer and that that was one of the things that always mystified me about the ‘art game’. In music I find myself confronted with exactly those same questions, and in many ways the aesthetic approaches I’ve learnt from photography come into play in a very intricate manner towards deciphering and understanding the odd processes by which art exerts its power in our time.

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SO Note: Visit The Velvet Cell for more information and to purchase Psychic Hearts.

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Tags: Book, David Dean, Photography, Photography Book, Sandra Croft, The Velvet Cell