To take a physical draft in a scrapbook and turn it into a photobook for print I decided to use InDesign. Having had no previous experience with the software I had to make use of online tutorials to build a basic knowledge though youtube videos and forums.
Setting up spreads with bleed and page guides, I was able to create a digital draft which I could then refine. Having a good idea of how the images would be positioned from the draft made this process a lot more straight forward than it would have been otherwise.
I dropped all the images I had selected into their respective spreads and started working with sizing and repositioning. I
The decision to have all of the images (aside from the first insert between the cover and the artist statement) with white borders and no full bleed is influenced by two factors. Firstly; it is simply the way that I am used to looking at my own photographs. When I publish work online or on my website it is never in a full bleed, whether on an Instagram post or on any format. Secondly, there is an influence from the style of the old family photo album or scrap book; the design of the photo albums owned by my parents always had borders. Darling is, in it’s most basic form very similar to an old family photo album, I am taking intimate and personal life and putting it into a photobook. This is something I had not thought about until seeing the project come together. The amount of negative space in a relatively large A4 book felt appropriate, I didn’t want to busy the pages or remove the ability to clearly focus on each image when digesting each spread.
Once this process was complete I further edited the images in the spreads and found gaps in the book where I would need to make new images to either insert into or replace what I had. Working off the back of re-shoots and added images, I extended the initial 40 page book to 56 in order to give some of the images more space to breathe and just exist on their own like landing points throughout the book and ended up changing many images again. Comparing the final draft to the scrapbook, most of the pages changed.
When researching the practice of book making, I found that this is often the case for every artist; Todd Hido discusses this in an interview with Aesthetica Magazine: “I always make a physical book dummy and swap in printouts and new images as I make them, and it’s a multi-step process that takes months and months to fine tune (…) I feel like the books we make are greatly benefited by me having this long, slow, solo experience of deciding what’s in and what’s out, and most importantly, the sequence those images end up in..” (Hido, 2015). The process is the same with nearly everyone I think, I labored over the design because I wanted to make something as intimate as the work is. Wendy Ewald argues that “the aesthetic of the process is just as important as the aesthetic of the finished piece”(Ewald, 2013), and it is something I completely agree with.
References
https://aestheticamagazine.com/interview-with-san-francisco-based-photographer-todd-hido/
Tools for sharing: Wendy Ewald in conversation with Anthony Luvera. in Photoworks (2013)
CRJ 