Progress Update 12 April 2017

My major project work is moving inexorably forwards and yesterday (11 April) I completed a first draft of my photo book for publication and sent it off to ‘Blurb’ for printing. When I receive the book later in the month I will, for the first time, be able to look at a hard copy version of the result of 18 months’ worth of project work. I have asked for two copies of the book; one for myself and one to send to my tutor for feedback. I am under no illusions that there is still work to do before I complete the project, but I hope that the second draft of the photo book will be the final version.

Following my tutor’s feedback from the 5^th (penultimate) assignment and my own review of the project work to date I made some minor revisions to the text, splitting one section of text into two in order to incorporate one additional montage. I then reviewed each of my images in turn, looking both for technical faults or problems as well as for ways in which I could introduce greater emotion and/or clarity into the montages. Following the review I made minor changes to most of the images, major changes to a few images and also replaced one image with a new one (although I retained the same basic idea in this last case). I produced one new image, to incorporate with a section of ‘split’ text (see above). The square format and 50% desaturated ‘style’ for the images was retained for the book – I have the option of using full colour if the printed images look too ‘washed out’. I did consider using monochrome for the images, but although this works well in many cases there are problems with a few of the montages.

I spent a lot of time thinking about what images to use for the front and back covers. For a long time I planned to use a new montage (one that did not directly relate to any of the images inside the book). However, I could not come up with a montage or single image that successfully summarised the content of the photo book. Eventually, having looked at many published photo book covers in shops, on the internet and in “The Photobook: a History Volume 3”, I decided to place a pared down version of one of the early images in the book on the front cover (Image 1) and a portion of another image on the back cover. Both images reflect ‘memories’ and the documentary nature of the project. The covers are, of course, subject to later change.

Image 1

I changed the title of the book on several occasions, but in the end reverted to “I Am Not There”. This is the title of the poem which I have included towards the end of the book, but also relates to the guilt, foreboding and other emotions that I experienced when I was not with my mother or even when I was with her but was unable to give her appropriate emotional support.

I have used ‘Blurb’ before to publish photo books and know how to handle their ‘Bookwright’ software, so it was relatively easy to produce the book template by combining the text and images. I asked for a soft cover book. I will seek advice and consider other photo book producers before producing the final version for assessment. This book will most likely have a hard cover.

Having completed the draft photo book I do not intend to ‘rest on my laurels’. I will produce large square prints of all the images used in the book (for studying fine detail and also possibly for submission for assessment). I still intend to produce a multimedia file, including video, potentially for assessment and am always looking for new ideas for montages in order to add to or replace those that I have already produced. However, replacement of images at this late stage of the project will only be done with good reason. I have one tutorial and one assignment left before assessment and I intend to use these to iron out any remaining faults and problems with the format and design of the images and photo book.