The initial layout of my book didn’t have a sense of a continuous theme throughout my design and layout. I wanted to imitate the content of my pictures through my design but the overall outlook of my design was too messy, untidy and had an overriding intense feeling. To improve the presentation of my book I used the templates instead of making my own to create a continuous flow. Below is my final design, improved from my initial design.

My photo book will focus on the ongoing political movement of feminism and claiming back power through portraits and tableaux’s of domestic scenes that comment on traditional characteristics and stereotypes of the female using humor, with inspiration taken from working artists and photographers, Liu Susiraja, Juno Calypso and Izumi Miyazaki.

Izumi Miyazaki created ‘Me and Me’ photo book consisting of surreal self portraits that question reality and female stereotypes in art. Miyazaki is a Japanese artist, her work is considered in her homeland to be nontraditional for a female artist which helps to break down barriers for other female artists within and out of her homeland.

I like the format of Miyazaki’s ‘Me and Me’, the inspiration I take from her book is the individual formats on each page for each photograph. Every layout on each page caters for one image, keeping each image separate with individual frames that work best for the overall mise-en-scene and treating each portrait as a separate piece of art. This is simply done with each image on a blank background with different crops and frames, size and placement giving each image a different area of negative space.

 I want my book to feel as authentic as my subjects and to disregard any connotations of mainstream beauty magazines, adverts or icons in western society. Females are usually represented to be refined and perfect with a sense of materialistic features and symbols which I think take away from the authentic female. I don’t want to replicate this in my photo book, I think glossy paper connotes this negative outlook as it’s often used in magazines that are sold to a consumerist audience, making them buy into unrealistic lifestyles and beauty standards that are toxic to the mind. I want my book to have a fresh authentic feel, using matte paper is more raw and real, not fake.

From the moment someone looks at the cover of my book I don’t want any prejudice opinions of the content just by looking at a photo or colour. Colour and photographs hold a range of meanings that could lead to presumptions about the content of my book. The word Feminism already has so many negative connotations and I don’t want to add any more negative outlooks on my book.