“Picture of My Life” by Junpei Ueda

Book in hand: how does it feel? Smell, sniff the paper:

Cover is a bit rough, smells like paper and brand new book smell.

Paper and ink: use of different paper/ textures/ colour or B&W or both:

There is a lot of different textured paper such as normal brown paper, premium lustre and net to strengthen spine of book all colours, also black and white.

Format, size and orientation: portraiture/ landscape/ square/ A5, A4, A3 / number of pages: Portraiture, roughly 100 pages.

Binding, soft/hard cover. image wrap/dust jacket. saddle stitch/Swiss binding/ Japanese stab-binding/ leperello: Flat bind with a hard cover and a image wrap.

Cover: linen/ card. graphic/ printed image. embossed/ debossed. letterpress/ silkscreen/hot-stamping:

Title: literal or poetic / relevant or intriguing: Literal as he is documenting a part of his life by taking pictures.

Narrative: what is the story/ subject-matter. How is it told? : ” I have this desire to sum up my life in the form of a story. My parents killed themselves, one after the other, in the winter of 1998. My mother’s depression led her to take her own life, and my father followed her nine days later. Having suddenly a closer relationship with death at just 21 years of age, I decided to write down the things I saw around me, as they were, and to capture in photographs the emotions I would only be able to feel then and there. I was alone in the house we had all lived in as a family. I had almost completely lost sight of the point in living. But even so, I kept on living.” https://www.photobookstore.co.uk/photobook-picture-of-my-life-_signed%5E.html Told by picture of him and his family, and pictures of the paintings his father did. Also included letters and translations of those letters. Is in chronological order.

Design and layout: image size on pages/ single page, double-spread/ images/ grid, fold- outs/ inserts: Different every page, single and double page spreads with pages with writing on them, photos on top of photos.

Images and text: are they linked? Introduction/ essay/ statement by artists or others.  Use of captions (if any): Letters linked with images, chronological order, at the end of the book there is a short statement from the photographer saying thank you.