Exhibition catalogue from the Groninger Museum on the works of Ruud van Empel (b 1958). Van Empel has developed a unique working method within digital photography. The images he compiles display a paradisiacal world that has never existed in the form shown. This world is populated by children and dreamy adolescents as a personification of innocence, which is one of the most important themes of Van Empel’s work. But innocence is always vulnerable, and the longing for paradise is an all-too-human illusion that will be disturbed sooner or later. From hundreds of fragments adopted from digital photos, Van Empel compiles new images that seem very life-like and realistic, but also conjure up a world that has never existed. Essays by Deborah Klochko, Oscar van den Boogaard, Ruud Schenk.