Dahlia is a flower, possibly a car, and unmistakably a mother. In her 2024 book for Setanta Books, photographer Vera van Dam draws these three meanings into a single line of inquiry, pitting two fixtures of everyday life — women and automobiles — against the ways advertising and domestic habit have claimed them. Her subject is not the machine or the body alone but the shared logic of surface and concealment: skin and metal alike wrap a frame, keeping an inside from an outside.

Van Dam works at the meeting point of intimacy and anonymity. A car can be as personal as a body and as generic as a type, and the book holds both conditions at once rather than resolving them. Across sixty-eight pages and forty-six images, the sequence moves through this doubled territory, and the design — credited to Van Dam with Martina Krosneva and Merel Korteweg — carries the argument as much as the photographs do. Rolien Sandelowsky contributes text. The first edition appears in softcover at 297 x 210 mm, with a PVC jacket and a cahier-stitch binding.

What gives the project its edge is the act of reclamation at its center. Van Dam takes subjects long conscripted by a masculine kingdom of advertising and returns them to closer, more ambivalent attention. The book is modest in extent, purposeful in construction, and unusually clear about its terms.

For collectors drawn to work that treats the photograph as an instrument of argument, Dahlia is worth noticing. Published in 2024 as a signed limited edition, it brings together photography, writing, and design as one gesture.