My personal study is all about my Grandparents, Ruth and Rowland and their lives. I have titled my project ‘The Heavens’ as I think that the surname of ‘Heaven’ is quite intriguing. I also think  that using the name that they both share as the title is the first indication that the book is about a married couple and about their love for one another.

In this project I tried to incorporate lots of different angles of their lives, I have tried to divide the book up and format it in a way that is easy to view.

I decided that I didn’t want to use a key image from my photo book as my cover, instead I used a picture of my grandparents table cloth as the cover image.  I also decided to not put the title, ‘The Heaves’ on the front cover. I wanted to leave the contains of the book a bit ambiguous. These formatting styles got inspired by Sam Harris’ book, ‘The middle of Somewhere’.

Sam Harris’ cover was designed by one of his daughters. I thought it was really eye catching and gave the book a slick look.

The next pages of my book contains a bright blue page followed by  the title page.

I thought that the blue was very eye catching and added colour straight into the book. I also think that having a couple of blank pages leading into the book is nicer than jumping straight into pictures.

I chose to use a couple of different picture formats throughout the book to keep it interesting.

This portrait of my Grandpa sat on his piano stool is a full bled image that is presented on the left page of the book. I think because this is a key image in this collection it is important to make it a large image. I also think that by having a plain white page on the right ride of the book, it emphasises the image. Sam Harris’ photobook contains all full bled images, as it suited his style of book, a family journal.

Another image layout I used is smaller images that are padded giving it a white boarder all the way round the image.

I mainly used this format when using archival images, as I didn’t want the images to be large and pixilated. In this example above I used my Grandparents favourite family photograph from when they were a young couple with their three boys. I then presented on the right side of the page an archival image of their three sons.

I tried to create a sequence by following these archival images with a  picture of my younger cousins.

I chose to use this picture of my cousins as the next photo in the sequence as they are around a similar age that my uncles were in the previous image. I think you can see the resemblence between my uncles and my cousins; the ginger hair, pale skin, cheeky smiles.

I had extracted my favourite quotes from my interviews with grandparents and wanted to insert them into my book. I divided these quotes into 5 categories; Faith, Family, Jersey, Wales and Music. I presented them like this in my book.

I didn’t want to accompany the words with any images as I wanted the views full attention on the quote. I got inspiration from Martin Usborne’s ‘Ive lived in East London for 86 1/2 years’. His project was on Joseph Meek.

The final formatting design I used was using archival images. At the begging of my book I used two separate images of my grandparents as children. I positioned them on joining pages with the same amount of padding. I also used two similar archival image but they were taken around the time they got married. I put these images on the final pages of the book.

Over view of my project

I am really happy with the way my project turned out. I think my images represent my grandparents lives well. I have really enjoyed working with the theme of family, as I think it has allowed me to really get stuck into the project, by working with a subject that I am familiar and comfortable with.