The Longest Way Round is a photo book by Photographer Chris Dorley-Brown. This photo book contains 183 colour and 43 black-and-white illustrations containing notes and memories from his parents lives.

“There was a suitcase filled with letters, photographs, folders and boxes that sat in Chris Dorley-Brown’s studio year after year. In it were images, notes and memories from his parent’s past lives that weren’t quite ready for the family album. They were eventful lives.” Source

I really like the way this photo book is like a printed scrapbook, so as to not damage the originals, I have found with my familys photo albums that a lot of the images have been damaged from falling out the albums and being handled a lot.

I find the contrast of the old and slightly damaged/dirtied images and scans of documents compared to the clean white pages of the photo book a nice juxtaposition, and I think i would like to include an element of this within my photo book.

The digitalised slides I have retrieved weren’t looked at for a long time and so were in good condition, and a couple of them look as though they could be digital images, and so they don’t have quite the same effect as the scanned in physical photos and written down notes.

To try and add this element within my photo book, which will explore my mothers life and memories from when she was born to present day, I am going to look through the photo albums I briefly explored in my archive project to find images which bring certain memories to my mums mind, and I am also going to include scans of the book my nan wrote in to keep track of who was in each of the slides. I feel like this connection to my Mum’s Mum will help with making this a quite personal book.