We borrowed our method from the galleries this city does so well: represent a small number of people properly, photograph them honestly, put the work in front of the right audience, and stay out of the frame ourselves.
Body to Body Amsterdam is a roster before it is anything else. Fifteen women, each met in person before her first booking, each photographed by us rather than supplied with a folder of borrowed images, each described in language we are prepared to stand behind at the door. Curation is the whole of our craft: we would rather decline a promising applicant than dilute a wall that currently earns its name.
We have never kept premises, and the reasons have held up for years. The women live scattered across Amsterdam, Centrum to Zuidas, the Jordaan to De Pijp, so each departure starts close to somewhere, and the twenty-to-thirty-minute promise for the centre is geometry rather than optimism. A guest never has to find an unfamiliar doorway in a strange city, because the only doorway involved is his own. And a session held in your room is held on your terms: your light, your temperature, your do-not-disturb sign.
The signature session gives the agency its name, and it is a genuine discipline: an hour of full-length contact, carried by placed weight and patience, is harder to give well than any photograph suggests. So we select for bodies that know how to listen, women with real training in slow oil work, foam, or the Japanese gel, and then we let each build the version of the hour that is hers. Angelika’s session does not feel like Milena’s, and it should not; a roster whose fifteen members were interchangeable would be a staffing pool, not a gallery.
The last thing we ask is availability that means something. Someone at this agency is awake and answering at every hour of every date on the calendar, the rates never shift with the clock, and a message sent at four in the morning is read at four in the morning. A city that keeps Amsterdam’s hours deserves an agency that keeps them too.