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Trine Søndergaard’s Now That You Are Mine portrays the lives of female prostitutes on the streets of Copenhagen’s red-light district, where Trine used to live.

The fact that the book is featured in the final volume of Phaidon’s acclaimed Photobook series edited by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger speaks to the quality of this groundbreaking work.

“Now That You Are Mine is a series of photographs taken between 1997- 2000. Ethical considerations have always been an integral part of Søndergaard’s documentary works: works in which the investigation of the exchange of human contact – also between the photographer and photographed – merges with the artistic drive to transgress the boundaries of the private sphere. By choosing to work with a conspicuous flash and in colour in the late ’90s, Søndergaard shattered the traditional narrative codes of documentary photography in a conscious challenge to aestheticised and distanced black and white ‘reality’.

Søndergaard goes beyond the walls of the private sphere, following the women and the ‘fly on the wall’. Released from these conventions, Søndergaard’s work embodies and explores the dualities of her own role as an artist, but also as a woman. The artist was personally and daily subjected to harassment by male customers on the street where she lived. Her own subjection to this male gaze marked the beginning of the project. She realised that she was not “seen”. That she existed only as a projected fantasy of a woman for the male customer. It is this fantasy her work ruthlessly exposes, a sexual fantasy in harsh contrast to the reality of infected needle sores and bruised skin.

The series gave Trine Søndergaard her international breakthrough, and today she is an indisputably central figure in a new generation of art photographers. In 2000 she won the prestigious German Albert Renger-Patzsch Award dedicated to publishing monographs that do justice to the visual ambition and quality of the work of outstanding photographers.”

– Finn Thrane, Museet for Fotokunst, Denmark