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The Life of a Guegan

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.

Archives

The thing that makes my project as full as it is, is due to the archive of images my Mum and Nan have kept over the years. A lot of people don’t have many photos of their parents, especially not in the amount that I have of my Mum, my Dad for example has about 3 images from the whole of his childhood, his parents split up and he went to boarding school and his set mum got rid of all of his possessions and photos, and so if i had tried to do this project on my Dad, it would have only shown the last 20 or so years of his life.

“Archives are important because they provide evidence of activities and tell us more about individuals and institutions. They tell stories. They also increase our sense of identity and understanding of cultures.” Source

The fact that my Mum and Nan have kept these archives is very important, because it allows us to remember things better, how their hair was, what the clothes were like, the places they used to see and the people they used to be close to.It has allowed me to gain a closer relationship to my Mum and understand that essentially, she has always been the same person, who is always happy and up for almost anything, she’s never worried about being sensible and doesn’t care if she looks bad in one photo. She’s always had a close family and a busy life.

Recent Photos

As well as all the old photos I have found, I also found old frames and some other bits which I wanted to photograph and include, as these elements can’t be scanned and i wanted them to appear more 3 dimensional within the book. I then took the images and made them transparent, so they would fit cleanly in the book.

These were also some other extra bits I found, which were scannable that I wanted to include within my photo book. The book was in the box of slides I found, in it was written some of the dates and names of people within the slides, so I wanted to include this, the other bits were little details that I wanted to add into the book to add more detail/variation/texture.

Albelli

Instead of using Lightroom to make my Photo books, I prefer to use Albelli, as there are more options and more possibilities.

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I chose to use a wrap around Photo cover and Layflat Premium, as I have used this for all of my previous Photo Books and I want to keep this continuity throughout all of the books I produce, so they all have similar appearances. The Layflat is also a really good feature, as it allows you to make more out of the pages, as you can see properly the whole page, rather than the centre being less visible due to pages curving. I t also makes the pages much stronger, and makes the book feel a lot nice, in my experience, so even though it costs a lot more, it is well worth it.

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Transparent images

Some of the images I scanned in had rounded corners or edges which I wanted to include in the photo book, as they vary the presentation of the images, and keeps the images as true to the originals as possible.

When scanning them in, the background wouldn’t always be completely white, and had lots of little bits of dust and dirt stuck to the back (I used the scanner in DT which probably has something to do with it), and in order to keep the photobook looking as smart and clean as possible not eh inside, I decided to go through and edit all the images with the white background, and make them transparent using photoshop. To then keep them as transparent files I saved them as PNG’s.

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Scanned In Images

As well as the digitalised slides and digital images from my Mums computer, there were also a lot of physical images from albums, ones both my Nan and Mum had put together, as well as finding lots of loose images from my Aunts box of photos and a box my Mum has of randomly collected images. I scanned in around 250 images, and wrote in the dates they had been written as being in the albums i found them in, or the date written on he back, however there were quite a few of these images with no context and no date, so I had to go through with my Mum and work out which images were from which years, going by haircuts, ages of children, friends etc.

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Selected Slides

From the 480 slides I decided to filter through them and find all the best images containing my Mum, and even though I still was only able to narrow it down to 118, this still made it much easier to find the images that I need or want to use within my book. Although the slides are my favourite images, it has been much more difficult to find each slide and find the year written on the physical slide, and the slides are all mixed up as to when they were taken, so I mainly used the slides for years when I couldn’t find many physical images.

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Photobook Specification

I really want this photobook to be as personal as possible, and so I have decided to create a kind of timeline throughout the book, which will contain 120 pages, just over two for every year of my Mums life, as she is turning 58 this year. Every double spread of pages will represent a year of my mums life, and will contain the best pictures of my Mum from that year.

All the photos within this book will have my Mum in, apart from images of cats, as cats are quite a big love within my Mums life, from Bingo to Charlie, to Monty and Bustopher Jones, to our current cats Panda and Willow, and I want to make sure the cats are properly shown as being a strong part of my mums life.

 

Calendars

Last night when looking through the images, we realised there were some dates of images which I didn’t know, so my Mum decided to get out her old calendars, which she has always kept. The calendars dated back to 1993 and go up till last year. When looking through we found the calendar from 1995, and in it was marked the time of my brothers birth, which I found quite interesting, and I think I am going to use the photo of that date in my phonebook for 1995.

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Nans Attik

To get more photos, I went into my Nans attik with my Mum, who hasn’t been up there in years, however I have been in the attic a lot myself as a child whenever I would be looked after by my Nan, so I know where a lot of certain bits and bobs are within the clutter from when I used to nose around.

I filmed my Mum whilst we were up there so I could remember how my Mum reacted to seeing certain things we found.

My Mum laughed quite a lot looking at all the different things written on all the supports in chalk.

From this trip, I found a huge box of my Aunts photos, in which I found many of my Mum, which I have scanned in.

When we were rummaging through everything in my Nans fairly cluttered Attik, I found a tin with lots of small bits in, which meant nothing to me, but my Mum was amazed I had found it, as it was one of her favourite things to play with when she was younger. The plastic bits all go together to build your own garden. My Mums Dad and Grandad both care(d) greatly for they gardens, and so I have a feeling this was where my Mum got this love of gardens from. Watching my Mum look through all the stuff in the time again was great, and she was so happy she’d been able to rummage through again and it seemed to bring back so many memories.

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Another item I came across was this old rocking horse type thing, which I played on when I was younger, but remembered seeing this within one of the slides of my mums youngest sister.

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In the back bedroom of my Nan and Poppa’s house, she has also still kept all the old games they used to play as children, some which are seen in the slides when they are opening them for christmas.

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The last thing I found which relates to a few of the slides, are these toffee hammers they used to play with, and even used as part of costumes.
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Although I probably won’t be able to use some of this stuff within my original planned photo book, I may be able to incorporate them into a smaller phonebook somehow, comparing old and new photos, as the photo book I have currently planned follows chronological order and so I can’t really compare photos from different times very well.

Colin Pantall: Sofa Portraits

Colin Pantall’s Sofa Portrait are a series of images of his daughter watching TV on their sofa.

“My Sofa Portraits are about the physical and psychological absorption of Isabel’s childhood” Colin Pantall, Source

I find these images really honest because of the way they have been taken, he hasn’t made her pose and hasn’t dressed her up in any particular clothes, he has just taken photographs of times when his daughter is engaged with whats on the TV, and its interesting to see the way she sits and her facial expressions.

Although I am not so certain about including images of this type, I was considering taking photos of my families reactions to seeing the images and such and include them in the book as well, instead I decided to video them viewing the images, so I could remember their reactions to certain images and record them telling old stories that they were reminded of in the images.

My Mum vs Cats

My whole family is quite the cat family (okay but seriously, we have cats and pictures of cats and doorstops of cats etc everywhere), my mum has had various cats throughout her life. Her first cat was Bingo, a ginger cat, who from what I’ve heard was fairly vicious and liked to jump out at people from behind bushes.

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Then where her and my Dad moved in together, they had a cat called Charlie, who they took care of after the owner couldn’t any longer, and then two male cats, Buster (short for Bustopher Jones) and Monty.

Buster was named after a poem by T. S. Eliot:

Bustopher Jones: The Cat About Town

Bustopher Jones is not skin and bones–
In fact, he’s remarkably fat.
He doesn’t haunt pubs–he has eight or nine clubs,
For he’s the St. James’s Street Cat!
He’s the Cat we all greet as he walks down the street
In his coat of fastidious black:
No commonplace mousers have such well-cut trousers
Or such an impreccable back.
In the whole of St. James’s the smartest of names is
The name of this Brummell of Cats;
And we’re all of us proud to be nodded or bowed to
By Bustopher Jones in white spats!

His visits are occasional to the Senior Educational
And it is against the rules
For any one Cat to belong both to that
And the Joint Superior Schools.

For a similar reason, when game is in season
He is found, not at Fox’s, but Blimpy’s;
He is frequently seen at the gay Stage and Screen
Which is famous for winkles and shrimps.
In the season of venison he gives his ben’son
To the Pothunter’s succulent bones;
And just before noon’s not a moment too soon
To drop in for a drink at the Drones.
When he’s seen in a hurry there’s probably curry
At the Siamese–or at the Glutton;
If he looks full of gloom then he’s lunched at the Tomb
On cabbage, rice pudding and mutton.

So, much in this way, passes Bustopher’s day-
At one club or another he’s found.
It can be no surprise that under our eyes
He has grown unmistakably round.
He’s a twenty-five pounder, or I am a bounder,
And he’s putting on weight every day:
But he’s so well preserved because he’s observed
All his life a routine, so he’ll say.
Or, to put it in rhyme: “I shall last out my time”
Is the word of this stoutest of Cats.
It must and it shall be Spring in Pall Mall
While Bustopher Jones wears white spats!

I hope to include this poem within my photo book, as I like its context in relation to the cats and how it obviously held significant meaning among my parents for them to name Buster after it.

After Monty and Buster both passed away, we decided to get two new kittens, Panda and Willow, these are the cats we still have to this day (there names weren’t so poetically chosen, but just seemed to fit them and their personalities) and they are a big part of our family. 

 

Rita Puig-Serra Costa: Where Mimosa Bloom

Where Mimosa Bloom is a photo book by Rita Puig-Serra Costa, who works in publishing in Barcelona. The book is based around her grief after her mother died.

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“Dealing with the grief she suffered following the death of her mother, Where Mimosa Bloomtakes the form of an extended farewell letter; with photography skillfully used to present a visual eulogy or panegyric.” Source 

When I saw the first pages of this photo book online, I was very intrigued by the cutouts, and how she had used that within the book. My teacher then brought into school this photo book to look at in person, as well as the other two photo books that I have already studied, where I saw that Chris Dorley-Brown also used this once within his photo book The Longest Way Around.

As soon as I saw the cutouts I was thinking about how interesting it was and how i could incorporate this into my phonebook to add more depth.

The above is the first way in which I could use this within my photo book, with hopefully five images down the edge of the page, and they gradually either appear or disappear as you turn the pages, if they were to disappear as you turn the pages, this would represent the way people change over time and tend to forget about the past in order to move on and change as a person,

If they were to appear as you turn the pages, as Puig-Serra Costa did within her photo book. this would represent the development over time not being able to predict the future, but being able to reflect on how much you’ve changed as a person, and I think this way of thinking represents my mum in a better light, as she doesn’t want to move away from the past as those experiences have brought her to where she is today.

There are also two different things I could do with this, the first idea I had thought of was to have photos from every five or so years of my mum down the side as a sort of timeline, but as I feel the images would become to small to properly view, I am going to have it sectioned in to 5 pages at a time, e.g. like how I had done above, where there are only five images down the side, but when it gets to the bottom page with either the last or all of the images on, it starts again with a different set of five images and so on.

I feel that this way I could section my mums life into periods of five years, meaning there will be around 60 pages within my book, and with this I can try to create some distinction of technology changing over time, as the images at the front will all be scanned in images, but when it comes to recent years, they will all be digital photos from modern day cameras.

This way not only am i creating depth with the pages, but also with the meaning behind all my creative decisions.

Chris Dorley-Brown: The Longest Way Round

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.

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“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.

Lydia Goldblatt: Still Here

A big part of my project is going to be formatting my photo book, with the mixture of old photos, my photos and scans of writing im hoping to include.

In order to do this in the best way possible I am going to look at some different ways of formatting photo books, and different ways of intergrating old and new images.

First i’m looking at Lydia Goldblatt, and her photo book, Still Here.

In the series Still Here by Lydia Goldblatt (*1978 in London), the artist immerses her intimate photographs in sublime extremes of light and shade, tracing the fleeting shadow of personal existence onto enduring human narratives.Source

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Goldblatt’s book, similarly to my project, focuses on family, specifically her elderly parents, and they record three years in her parent’s lives.

I didn’t want something observational, something with critical distance, and I never thought of taking the photographs as work; I don’t quite know what it was.” Lydia Goldblatt

These are a couple sample pages from her book Still Here, the layout is very simple, with her square format images being placed in the centre of each page. The images she has placed on each double spread compliment each other, having similar light levels, colours and/or subject matter. The images each focus on a singular thing, which I like because it highlights that one aspect object and brings it to the viewers attention, helping to build a story within the book.

while the images depict the physical decay, indignities and vulnerabilities of old age without sentimentality, they also reveal the perverse beauty in wrinkled, mottled flesh and grey hair, making visual poetry out of a mole, a scar or even the stain of bodily fluid.Source

Reactions

In order to capture my family’s reactions to the images, today whilst they were all around at my house, I filmed them all looking through all the digital images, to see their reactions and hear any memories and stories the images brought back.

As my Poppa’s birthday is on the 13th, I will also be taking photos of them when they all look through the photo album which I will hopefully be able to include in my final photo album.

 

For my Family: First Photo Book

For my Poppa (grandad)’s birthday, me and my Mum decided that we should make him a photo book with the digitalised slides, so I got onto the app that I use for editing my books, and put together a book containing the best of the slides we got digitalised.

Although this is nothing like what i intend to create as my final book, its a starting point to see layouts and get an idea for which images do and dont print well and to see which images my family have the best reactions to.

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The Box of Boxes: Slides

When I mentioned the Archive project to my Nan which we were doing for our coursework, she started looking for old photo albums and trying to make sure she could dig them all out, we had tried to get her to do this on several occasions, but the mention of me needing them forced her into action, and after she had found all the old albums and I was half way through my last project, she dug up a box of slides, and asked if I’d be able to make use of them.

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The box contained several boxes with hundreds of slides, 480 to be exact, and a book where my nan had tried to keep record of who was in each photo and what year the photo was taken in etc.

We then took the box of slides to be digitalised so I could work with the photos and show them to all my family, who haven’t seen these images in at least a few decades.

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René Magritte

A good way of explaining my thoughts on the images of my family is the work of René Magritte.

Magritte was a Belgian surrealist artist, who’s work shows ordinary objects with an unusual context. The one image which I specifically thought of with my project was ‘La trahison des images’ (The Treachery of Images), in which he has painted an image of a pipe, with the words “Ceci n’est pas un pipe” (This is not a pipe). This image demonstrates a similar way of how I have been looking at the digitalised slides.

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Whilst Magritte had painted an image of a pipe, it is not actually a pipe, and when Magritte was once asked about this image, he replied that of course it was not a pipe, just try to fill it with tobacco.

In a similar way, whilst these photos are of my mum, they aren’t my mum as I know her now. These images are also not how my mum would remember those moments, because she was seeing the other perspective, looking at the person taking the image, which is a perspective I will never be able to see.

These photographs also don’t allow me to know how the people within the pictures felt at that time, what was happening in my mums life at that time, who was she friends with? What had she been doing in school? Not being able to know these things makes it very difficult to build up a picture of what my mum, and all of my relatives, were like at that time.

 

Truth Fantasy Fiction

Recently my Nan found a huge box of old slides from my mums childhood, and so I decided to get them converted so that we would all be able to look at them properly, but when I was looking through the digital versions of these images, I found it really hard to actually picture the images as moments in my mums life, and her two sisters lives.

The images in my mind were like illustrations in a fictional book, and so I want to try and find a way to explore this idea of my mums fictional life, I want to find out about stories that accompany the image so I can try to understand them, and hopefully I can find a way to express the connection between my mums life and my own.