Seeing (more than) double

“Uitsmijter” is a Dutch sandwich made with ham, eggs and pickle. It’s also the name of a photograph taken by Miranda Kremer that won her silver in the AIPP Victorian Photography Print Awards.

Miranda’s friend had given her a cookbook she found in an op shop – The Art of Dutch Cooking, published in 1961.

“It was really old fashioned. It had illustrations instead of photographs and I thought ‘I will at some stage cook from this book’,” Miranda said.

“So I started taking recipes from the book, cooked what it was per the book and then photographed it.”

Other such experiments included stewed pears, brussels sprouts and sausages with sauerkraut.

Miranda, who is originally from the Netherlands, studies photography part time at Photography Studies College (PSC).

When she moved to Melbourne from London, her immediate plan was to care for her two young children.

“My friend said ‘you should do something with photography, you make really great images’,” Miranda said.

Miranda had travelled extensively – around Europe, the US, Africa – and had always documented the nomadic lifestyle with her camera.

“I’d never thought of photography in that way, I just always had a camera with me and was taking pictures for friends or of travel.”

She ended up enrolling at PSC while pregnant with her third child.

“I signed up and did 10 weeks and then I took a year off,” she said.

When she came back, she picked up where she left off. She says, as a parent, her work sometimes inevitably revolved around themes of family or children.

This is most obviously true of her work Seeing Double – a set of portraits of young twins.

“It wasn’t just ‘I’m going to photograph twins’, it was about connection and the fact that they’re still individuals,” she said.

“You see the connection in how they hold each other in a certain way, but the disconnection by looking in different directions, or not at each other, or not straight at the camera.”

“I didn’t want it to look like normal portraits. It had to be a bit awkward. That’s why the colour is like that and you can’t see their hands.”

If you see double when looking at Miranda’s twin portraits, looking at her different projects is the opposite. There doesn’t seem to be huge overlap, signalling a flair for broad expertise.

Miranda said she was looking into creating a book with the Dutch community next year.

“There is quite a big Dutch community in the area and I’m thinking of doing portraits of people that have been here for a long time, putting it into a book with interviews and older pictures provided by them,” she said.

“It will be a bit of a Dutch history book. I left the Netherlands in 1990 and I’ve never really gone back to my roots.”

You can find more by Miranda at mirandakremersphotography.com/seeing-double/