I would love to make a photo project about you by Merel Hegenbart

In 2020, while living in a flat, Merel Hegenbart met Doro, a young Croatian woman who had just moved into a room down the corridor. From the first moment Hegenbart saw her, she was struck by Doro’s presence: intelligent, articulate, physically strong, and unapologetically herself in every setting. The sense of freedom surrounding her fascinated Hegenbart, and this admiration and curiosity became the foundation for an eight-month-long multimedia project centered on Doro’s freedom, photography, and the evolving relationship between them. What began as a meeting between strangers gradually developed into a close friendship.

Through this wide range of media (photos, film still, What’s App conversations, transcribed verbal exchanges, scanned postcards, personal notes), the project not only documents the development of their relationship but also questions how stories are told. The book examines what photography reveals, what it conceals, and how it constructs or distorts meaning — by weaving in other forms of narration alongside the images. Each medium contributes its own perspective, allowing the same interactions to be reinterpreted in multiple ways. The question driving the project is whether these different voices bring viewers closer to a “complete” story.

The resulting book — chronologically ordered and containing 1,800 pages at 15 cm high — is both a visual, anthropological, and conceptual journey into Doro, Merel, and their relationship. It raises fundamental questions about the bond between photographer and subject, about intimacy and its mediation through the camera, and about the ways photography shapes or unsettles perception of reality. By openly showing the process of making, the work becomes a unique, experimental attempt to narrate the evolving connection between two people.

At its core, the project reflects on womanhood, exploring how two young women from different worlds — Doro from Croatia and Hegenbart from the Netherlands — experience identity and freedom. They mirror, inspire, and challenge one another in shaping their own narratives. The search for freedom — as women, as individuals, and as artists — runs through the work, offering both a personal and universal lens. Ultimately, the project highlights the strength of female connection and the role photography can play in capturing and reimagining that experience.

In a time when visual culture increasingly shapes how we relate to the world and to each other, this work invites reflection on the space between recording and experiencing, between distance and closeness, and between freedom and connection.

Merel Hegenbart is a visual artist who works primarily with photography, alongside text fragments, correspondence, film and archival materials. Together these media create a multimedia narrative that brings different perspectives into dialogue. Her practice explores human relationships, loss, freedom and perception as recurring themes. While many of her projects begin from a documentary starting point, her conceptual approach and investigative attitude add philosophical and anthropological dimensions.

For Hegenbart, the creative process is never hidden but becomes a visible and essential part of the work itself. This openness invites the viewer to reflect, and transforms each project into both a story and an inquiry – examining not only what is represented, but also how storytelling unfolds and what photography, as a medium, can reveal, conceal or construct.

Photography, book concept: Merel Hegenbart
Essay: Diane Smyth
Design: Calin Kruse, Yana Kruse
Typography concept Ekaterina Lupanova