Connecting with Gerry Badger’s reading – ‘Photobook’:

I have considered a lot throughout reading over and over Gerry Badger’s ‘Photobook’, a photo book that I want to produce is a novel and a bit like a film, the article highlighted Lewis Baltz’s quote that “a narrow but deep area lying between the novel and the film.” The way I understood Lewis Baltz’s quote was that if  I want my photo book to understand or to interpret the way I am expecting them to, the first step is to sequence it like a paragraph, imagine each photograph is a ‘word’ and each page becomes a ‘sentences’, so the sequence of each photograph is the key elements that make up a photobook.  He has also highlighted that reading “a photobook is firstly about appreciating the aesthetic worth of the individual photograph within the book, which itself is a process that seeks to understand, or perhaps even divine, the photographer’s best intentions. Secondly, it is about following the story that is being told, negotiating not only a trail of facts but a labyrinth of signs and symbols”. These two sentences were the most useful reference for me to produce my own photo book, before I started to really use Gerry Badger’s article as a reference to process this project brief, I have never carefully think about how will I lay the photograph out, I didn’t consider this to be an important element that needs to be considered thoroughly. At the first point of planning the layout of each page, as a palette doesn’t really have a sequence so I would put all colour on every page.

As he mentioned in the first part of the article, each photograph is a ‘word’ or even a ‘keyword’ for the book which means each of them has to be very carefully selected and arranged. I think I fully understand what means to create a photobook, and why is each process so important. Each of the selected photographs need to work very effectively in order to let my audience feel what I am trying to communicate. Even within the same colour group such as red, the sequence could start with a photo that doesn’t really show the main focal point, and the following photos will gradually show my intention and the focal point.

Keywords on my palette:

• Red (with yellow): Isolation, distance, speechless
• Blue & Pink:
• Green & Purple: Relax, calming
• Black: Anger
• White: Youth, the loneliness and the sense of revolt of youth

Complete shooting:

1 – shoot from above the object, but wasn’t showing too much about the main intention

2 – slowly focus to the yellowish details in the frame

3 – showing more precisely the featuring of yellow

4 – The main intention of this group of photo – the sense of isolation and distance in between