My photo book is titled ‘The Life of A Guegan’, which was my Mums first surname. I decided to use this because even though she is now married to my Dad and has the surname Pitter, she will always be a Guegan, and takes pride in that Surname.
The photo book has 120 pages, and explores all elements and years of my Mums life in a few forms and although the book is ready to print, it will not be completed until I receive the printed book and have cut out all the squares within the book marked ‘Cut Out’ (all 110 of them). Although this process will take a lot of time, I think it will be really worthwhile and I don’t regret my choice to include this feature throughout my whole photo book, which was inspired by Rita Puig Serra-Costa’s book, Where Mimosa Bloom.
This book is something which I’m already very proud of and my Mum and I (and the rest of my Family) are very excited to see the physical version of it, and treasure it forever as the most accurate lie about what my Mums life was like.
It will never be the truth. The book was heavily edited by me. I made so many choices of what images to include, which images should be the thumbnail to represent my Mum from that year, how he images should be layed out, what writing should be displayed. A lot of the images were slightly edited (making them transparent, changing the size slightly to fit the page properly etc) and are no longer the same images they are as their original physical prints or slides. The images aren’t in their proper correct order, in the same way that its sometimes hard to get memories in the right order, as they get more confused the further away they get from the current day. They will never show completely what my Mum was thinking or feeling, even my Mum will never remember all that.
The truest this book will ever be is when I look through this book with my Mum and my Family and my Mum will tell stories behind certain images, and where the images were taken and who the images were taken with, which will give an extra dimension to the book, one that can only be achieved by the presence of my Mum.
