Now That You Are Mine — Trine Søndergaard， Signed First edition, Steidl

Trine Søndergaard’s Now That You Are Mine is a stark, intimate portrait of Copenhagen’s red-light district in the late 1990s — a place of transit, proximity, and brutal exposure. Made between 1997 and 2000, the work documents women working as prostitutes in the streets around Skelbækgade and the central train station. Søndergaard, who lived in the neighbourhood herself, uses the camera to witness a world many refuse to see — not out of voyeurism, but from within the ambient tension of being a woman moving through public space.

The 33 images are hard-lit, nocturnal, and direct. Flash burns against wet pavement, bodies lean into waiting cars, fur coats, neon signs, thighs under streetlight. There is no sentimentality here, nor performance. The women look at the camera, or past it, but always with the alertness of survival. Søndergaard’s refusal to aestheticise is what gives the work its force — the eroticism belongs to the world outside the frame, to the male gaze these women endure.

What results is a love book in reverse. The title, Now That You Are Mine, might belong to a client or to society itself — the possession of bodies, the illusion of choice. First published by Steidl in 2002 and bound in black embossed artificial leather, the book is as tactile and circumspect as its contents. An important early work in Søndergaard’s career and a rare document of sex work in Northern Europe, handled with rigour, courage, and proximity.

Technical Sheet
Title: Now That You Are Mine
Artist / Author: Trine Søndergaard
Date: 2002
Technique / Printing Method: Offset
Medium / Materials: Hardcover with embossed artificial leather
Dimensions (cm): 28.7 × 26.7
Signed
Pages: 72
No. of Illustrations: 33
Publisher / Editor: Steidl
Designer: Camilla Jørgensen / Trefold
Condition: Like new