Toer is the forty-sixth title in One Picture Book Two, published by Nazraeli Press in a hardcover format: sixteen pages, sixteen duotone plates. The book’s brevity is a condition of its form. Each plate must answer to the one before it, and the portrait accumulates across the sequence rather than in any single image.

The subject is Toer van Schayk, born in 1936, a Dutch painter, sculptor, choreographer, dancer, and designer of scenery and costumes. Susan Zadeh photographed him over six months in his Amsterdam atelier, observing and documenting him at work. The publisher calls the result a study of an artist at work by another artist, and the description is exact: Zadeh had been a dancer with Het Nationale Ballet in Amsterdam and had taken part in van Schayk’s dance creations. The series therefore rests on a working acquaintance rather than on a stranger’s granted sitting. Van Schayk was eighty-eight during the sittings and, by Zadeh’s account, still making new work each day. The photographs attend to sustained late productivity as it occurs, not as summarized through career landmarks.

Zadeh moved to photography after a twelve-year career with the Dutch National Ballet, and later founded Eyemazing, the magazine that ran from 2002 to 2013 and received a Lucie Award. Toer belongs to the period in which she has concentrated on her own work. The project returns her to the world of dance from the other side of the camera, and that vantage sharpens the book’s interest: a former dancer’s close attention to a dancer-choreographer, made in his Amsterdam atelier and edited to sixteen plates.

Each copy is numbered within a run of 500 and includes an original 5×7 inch photographic print signed by Susan Zadeh. The book and its print are issued together, and the small hardcover keeps the attention exact rather than expansive.