Come Closer

Dinaya Waeyaert
Come Closer

Photographs: Dinaya Waeyaert

Publisher: Dienacht

164 pages

Year: 2021

Comments: Printed fold-out cover with contact sheets and with additional foldout portrait (36 x 50 cm) on the front cover, handwritten title, 17 x 24 cm. Including: hand taped notes, drawings and tissues; detachable post-its. Offset printing + extra varnished polaroid pictures.

We’re thrilled to present the long-awaited Come Closer by Dinaya Waeyaert. The book feels like an intimate conversation between the two lovers, where one obsessively photographs and the other writes notes. This photobook diary is intimate and very personal and therefore in many ways hand-made: it is full of special handworks inside that are hand-taped and -folded, and every book bears a hand written title. So, in the end, every piece is unique.

Come Closer
Come Closer is about my love for a woman, her name is Paola.
We fell in love four years ago. Ever since, I have felt the urge to photograph her every day. As part of this series you will find mostly colour and black-and-white 35mm pictures accompanied by polaroids, notes and contact sheets, but it also features videos.
The work feels like an intimate conversation between her and me. I am an observer trying to grasp every playful moment, every moment of connection. Seeing someone so versatile and constantly changing, I tend to overload her with my presence. And then there is her, my subject, someone who feels more like a muse to me. Loving me like no one ever did.
In Come Closer you get to see the love between two women from up close.

About Dinaya
I am a Belgian artist based in Brussels. After finishing my education at School of Arts Ghent in 2018, I self-published my first book Personal Collection.
Ever since I started photographing I focused on people who were closest to me. The ones that I’ve known for a long time or the ones that I feel drawn to. When we grow older our relationships with the people around us evolve. Somehow I feel the need to hold on to this by making images. Already now when I look back at all the pictures I’ve taken, it feels like a family album where everyone, even myself, changes every day.
I take a lot of pictures. Every series I’ve made is built around a great deal of images. This is a certain obsessive way of working I have always loved.