In an era when colour printing is assumed to be automatic and invisible, Fake Flowers in Full Colour asks a stubbornly analog question: can a three-dimensional colour separation be made by hand? Jaap Scheeren and Hans Gremmen began with a bouquet of artificial flowers, then built four still lifes of it, one each in Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. Each was photographed; the four were then combined into a single image. In principle the result should have matched the original arrangement. In practice it became something else, and the book takes its title from that gap between intention and outcome.

Both Scheeren and Gremmen are credited as photographers, with Ilse van Rijn contributing a text titled Phoenix. Forty pages, printed in sixteen colours, hardbound at 24 by 34 centimetres, the book gives the experiment room to breathe: the reader can track how registration, ink and paper rewrite artificial petals into something stranger and more chromatic. The project belongs to the tradition of process-driven photobooks in which the printing method is not a neutral vehicle but a participant.

The book appeared from Fw:Books in 2009. That same year it was named Best Photobook of 2009 by PhotoEye and reached the finals of the Dutch Design Award for Best Graphic Design. Such recognition reflects how closely the design and the photographic inquiry are bound together: the publication is as much an argument about reproduction as it is a set of pictures.

For collectors, the interest lies in the evidence of method. This is a book where collaboration, process and structure are legible on every spread, and where a simple question about colour separation produces a genuinely unpredictable object. It rewards the kind of attention given to the photobook as a designed artefact rather than a container for images.