Book Ideas
Over the past few days I have decided that I want my project to develop into either a photographic book or zine. This is because I want my project to be in a physical form that the viewer can have access to and keep in their own homes. I have been looking at different photobook selling stores and websites for inspiration as to how I can lay out my front cover and what materials to use.
Through research I have found that I want to incorporate tracing paper pages within my book to overlay some images with text from my mum’s hospital notes, my own research and my mum’s notebooks. I think that this text is important to include within my project as it shows me and my mum as who we are, we collect notes and research as part of our coping mechanisms. I also decided on sequencing ideas after looking at the book ‘Understanding Photobooks’ by Jörg Colberg. This book is really useful when you need to gain more knowledge on photobooks, sequencing, design, production and editing.
My book draft starts off with two images ‘Dusk’ and ‘Faith’ they are both at the top of the page as they are both very important to me and my mum. They show our common ground, the garden that we both love to sit in together and my mum’s necklace which I now wear everyday. The next spread is a full sized image of my mum in the mirror a few days after her operation. I love that photo as it really shows her as a person, she is incredibly strong and I find it mesmerising how she just got on after only just having surgery, putting her makeup on and getting dressed. She is such an empowering woman. I felt that an image with this much power deserved a full page on it’s own to be the main focus. The next page shows my main research that I typed up after finding out that my mum had cancer. I decided to put this on a page that would be printed on tracing paper and therefore would overlay on top of the next image. The image being of my mum’s hands holding the petals off of our tree. Me and my mum both saw the shedding of the petals as a new beginning as they started to fall just as she started her radiotherapy. The next spread then shows a portrait of me and my mum on the left bottom corner and me and my mums hands on the top right corner. I put the two images so far apart as I see them as us at the beginning of the diagnosis vs how far in we now are. In the first image we are slumped and I am my mum’s shoulder to lean on, whereas the second image is us showing our strength and supporting each-other no matter what barriers there may be (the glass being the barrier in the image). The size of my book is 6 X 8.25 inches as that is the size of the breast care file that my mum was given when she was diagnosed. A title page has not yet been decided.