‘Zul je met mij’ is a photo essay about mourning lovingly.
Twenty years after her mother passed away from the nerve-muscle disease ALS, photographer Gerdien Wolthaus-Paauw opened her mother's box with "life signs": notes she wrote when she could no longer speak. The photographer also sought out people who had known her mother well. These renewed meetings inspired her to make a series of associative photos.
The book brings together the texts of the notes and the memories of acquaintances of Pieta Wolthaus-Paauw with the photo series shot in Portugal.
The original “life signs" are written on different pieces of (leftover) paper. The photo essay is printed on the soft Lessebo paper, which adds a tactile layer to the experience of the book. The open spine which refers to the rawness of the grieving process. The book is held together by a yellow thread, which together with the yellow first and last pages represent warmth and lightness and comfort in the difficult process of letting go.
The book is designed in such a way that the images frame the different texts, creating a dialogue between the photographer now and the words of her mother twenty-five years ago.
