The magazine of the photo-essay
Oct back 2016 issue
by Willeke Duijvekam
“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!”
Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film & documentary maker
The everyday lives of two gender dysphoric teenagers, pictured by the documentary
photographer Willeke Duijvekam.
Mandy & Eva are girls, even though they were born as boys. Willeke Duijvekam
followed their lives for six years, through the whole of their adolescence. She was
guided by her fascination with the perplexing split between body and mind, and her
growing admiration for the courage of these teenagers who refused to allow society's
expectations to dictate their lives.
By having followed the two girls for so long, Duijvekam's eye sees far beneath the
surface. The photo series reveals how for Mandy & Eva the transformation into self-
assured young women was chiefly an inner process. Her quiet photos show the girls
going about their daily lives, or lost in their own thoughts. The struggle to outwardly
become the girls that they already were inwardly must be read in the details.
The book Mandy & Eva is designed as two books in one cover, one spine left and
one right. The pages are folded alternately and so overlapping each other, first
revealing a picture of Mandy, than a picture of Eva and so on, emphasizing not so much
similarities between the two girls but even more so their differences. The photos are edited back in time, starting now
and ending six years ago.
The book Mandy & Eva was nominated for the Dutch Design Award, acquired for the Quickscan collection of the Dutch
Photomuseum and mentioned as best or favourite photobooks in 2013 by Joerg Colberg, Photonews and de Volkskrant.
