Day after day, throughout the world and in every culture, this secret performance is played out in bathrooms, behind closed doors. A transformation is made from the completely private to the public, from defenceless to fitness to fight, from innocence to professionalism.
There is something distinctly feminine about what goes on there, something intimate and mysterious. And above all there is something that most of us instinctively know that can neither be taught nor learned. This “self-beautification”, this drive to construct self-image, this striving for the personal ideal, is about identity.
Who am I? I? I!
The power of the mask, the charm of the masquerade in a game with all the possibilities of what might be – these are the things we do, getting to the bottom of things, by emphasising and hiding, creating our own theatrical mise en scène in secret. The real interlocutor in this unending process is the patient surface of the mirror as it reveals what is, permits everything, and forbids nothing. Every woman, from young girl to old lady, has mastered this intuitive dialogue with her own image, surrendering to it with relish, and sometimes with frustration. A woman is never more truly herself than here in the bathroom in front of the mirror. And probably only a woman is capable of capturing with her camera the stages of this wonderful process with absolute and merciless precision and, crucially, interrogating the irony of it all.
During 2003-2004 Annet van der Voort took portraits of eight women between the ages of eight and well over eighty. The first photograph of each person was always taken immediately after the subject awoke, the last shortly before she left home. This is a period in which – everyday and throughout the world – millions and millions of similar metamorphoses take place – only to begin anew the next day.
