Book review in edition 6, January 2015.

Photography is for everyone and belongs to all of us, but we still keep looking for the special and the exceptional among all the billions of snapshots. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, there is another discovery: Henri Senders (1958) decided to take up the camera seriously in 2006 and now, some eight years later, his first publication appears; a collection of female models portrayed behind a glass shelter. At first glance a cliché perhaps, but even if it were a well-trodden path, the result here is astonishingly consistent. Senders may be a relative novice in photography, he is mature enough to know what he is doing.

The book reminds me somewhat of the work of Miroslav Tichy, the Moravian who secretly photographed the ladies from his region with his self-made cameras, which resulted in deliberate technical imperfections and blurry, shaky, badly printed, scratched and unclear photos. But unlike Tichy’s work, what we see here is much more a confession of an obsession that was brought under control fairly quickly. In the epilogue, Senders indicates that he never works with a preconceived plan, but a certain focus on a desired result resonates throughout the book, and that concentration also seems to have radiated to the people portrayed – young ladies found on websites for model photography.

In Search Of Intimacy consists of 71 numbered plates, including the back cover, without further titles per image, which was a fortunate decision. Although made of fairly heavy paper, the pages remain translucent, which reinforces the sense of voyeurism that is already palpable in the images themselves, because Senders photographed the models behind glass walls (he hardly does any post-processing, all the blurry effects come from the chosen locations). Furthermore, the book has in the middle of each section black and white images that are reminiscent of the work of Gerard Fieret and Sanne Sannes. They give the book a subtle, but necessary, extra complexity. 

(text translated from Dutch)