Sanne van den Elzen is both a photographer and a beauty specialist. This book is her graduation project at the School of Fine Art and Design | St. Joost in Breda. It has two identical front covers, very simple with the title and a photo of an empty chair. One is at the front, the other, inverted, at the back. Inside, too, all the photos are printed twice, once as seen by the beauty specialist, once as seen by the photographer, our gaze being steered by text.
The photographs are mainly of women, with the occasional picture to set the scene, printed exactly the same from whichever end you approach them so that the images in each pair are inverted relative to each other. Inevitably this means that in the middle of the book we have a fascinating spread of an already inherently interesting photo of a bunch of tulips on a small table beneath a mirror in which we can see a woman’s head and a chandelier.
Perhaps it’s a pity all this consistency hasn’t been carried through to the introduction and publishing details, both of which are only printed once. So it turns out that there is a front and a back to this fascinating double book after all.