IF DREAMS ARE REAL
Jia She
LET’S STAY ASLEEP
Magnum x Spéos 2024 - 2025
JIA SHE
IF DREAMS ARE REAL
LET’S STAY ASLEEP
This is an invitation into a dream made of memory and reality. A space where emotion often feels more truthful than fact. I began this project during a time of emotional turbulence and deep uncertainty. What once felt stable, my sense of identity, connection, and understanding, began to shift. I didn’t want to explain it. I didn’t even want to make sense of it. I picked up the camera not to analyze the change, but to exist inside it. Each image became a quiet act of resistance, a way to reach toward something just out of reach. I blended real moments with fragments of memory, because the past and present often blur. These images don’t follow a timeline, because memory doesn’t. They loop, fade, return. They feel quiet. Unresolved. But hopefully, never dark. This work became a reflection on perception’s instability, on how memory bends, how meaning reshapes, how emotion shifts the way we see. An intimate gesture may later feel distant. A single moment, can take on a completely different weight. I didn’t want to define these images—or myself—too precisely. I wanted to leave space for what’s still unfolding.
When we look at an image, we don’t just see what’s in front of us. We bring our own memories, emotions, and questions. What we see is shaped by where we are internally. So I didn’t want these photos to speak too loudly. I wanted them to leave room—for your own reflection. For you to feel something personal, even if it’s not the same as what I felt. These images aren’t conclusions. They exist somewhere between knowing and not knowing, between holding on and letting go. If Dreams Are Real, Let’s Stay Asleep asks us to remain in the dream a little longer. To drift with what’s uncertain. Even though we know dreams end. We all wake up and return to what’s real. Still, I believe there’s something worth staying inside for: the unclear, the almost, the not-yet. That’s where this work lives. Not in clarity, but in presence. Not to explain—but to feel. Just to say: this happened. And this… is how it felt.
You think it’s an ending, but maybe, it’s already starting again.
@iiisheiii summersheh@gmail.com jiashe.net
佘佳 Jia She A creative documentary photographer, originally from Shanghai and currently based in Paris. For her, photography serves both as a creative documentary practice and a form of inner reflection — a way of navigating the unseen. Through a poetic and conceptual aesthetic, she explores the tension and interplay between internal emotional landscapes and external realities. Each frame is shaped by mystery and visual lyricism, becoming a quiet act of resistance that reaches toward what remains intangible and elusive.