Glossary

Profile photographs

Profile photographs are the portraits heading each woman's page, each one showing the woman whose name it carries, and most guests choose by them.

Guests choose from pictures, and experienced guests have learned to read them with care. Online, the trade is crowded with images that were borrowed, filtered heavily or taken years ago. On this roster each portrait shows the woman whose name sits beneath it and appears with her agreement, and when a woman leaves the wall her frame and its pictures come down with her.

How to look at a set

Treat a profile as a sequence rather than a single frame. Most carry four photographs; Jasmin's carries seven, while Danielle's and Liana's carry three. The first image shows how she chooses to present herself, and the later ones show the same woman from other angles and in other light, which says more than any one flattering shot could. Heights are printed beside the images, from Lea at 165 cm to Milena at 175 cm, because a photograph on a phone screen gives no sense of scale.

Light matters more than it sounds. Evening light hides and flatters in equal measure, while a frame lit by a window at midday shows hair colour, skin and build much as they will look under a bedside lamp, so where a set includes one, that is the frame to linger on.

When the portrait and the door disagree

The woman at the door should be the woman in the frame, and a guest who finds otherwise should say so in the booking conversation straight away, before any balance changes hands. That is the rare case. The more familiar one is a guest who found the pictures accurate and still sensed the evening was not quite a fit; the journal piece on when you did not click handles that kindly.

Photographs show a face and a figure. They cannot show a laugh, a voice or the calm some women bring into a room, which is why the short notes under each portrait are worth reading as carefully as the images. For a method that reads the whole wall at once, see reading the contact sheet.

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