The Epilogue

“Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are brutal holidays in our family”

The Epilogue is a book that tells the the story of the Robinsons family after losing their 26 year old daughter and the aftermath suffered from this. The style of the work falls under the style of documentary photography, specifically outsider documentary. The photographer works closely with the family as an outsider to reconstruct a narrative surrounding the family’s lost loved one through the memories and experiences of various family members. The daughters name was Cammy and she died from bulimia. The imagery has an intent to capture the essence of absence and grief while juxtaposing this with omnipresent celebration of life. This is done through straight photography with collections of portraits as well as imagery that captures the mise en scene of Cammy’s home are used in sequential tandem to tell the story.

Laia Abril

An artist, born in Barcelona, 1986, who explores notions of eating disorders, sexuality, bio-politics and woman’s rights in her work. She made The Epilogue to explore the subject of eating disorders. This has intentions of bringing to light the extent that eating disorders effect people and their loved ones. The book is made for the attention of young people, specifically young women who are living a similar experience, weather that be by the first hand or someone close to them struggles with an eating disorder. The book received a rating of 4.5 from CPHmag and received an in-depth coverage in The Guardian as well as an award from Aperture Paris and was, therefore well received.

The book has a hard cover with a coarse texture with a smaller patch of smooth paper in the centre of the front and back covers. This varying material on the front cover contains the title of the poetic and intriguing tile in a small digital style font and covers the face of the girl in the image on the front and back cover it contains the blurb. This image is assumed to be an old portrait of Cassy and possibly her younger sister on the back.

It is fairly heavy for a 19 x 16 book and feels quite rugged. The first page consists of a matte paper while the rest of the book consists of a glossy paper. The use of colour is consistent throughout the book with dark cold colours being prominent in order to set the mood of the narrative. The book features inserts of old documents and letters personal to the family being documented which are fitted in sequentially in between pages.

The book is in A4, portrait format. It is 172 pages long. It is case bound and section stitched.

The story of Cammy and the Robinsons family is told by Abril through a combination of tableaux images taken by herself, along with old family archival imagery which is subtitled and dated. These images are constructed sequentially to annotate to the narrative and are all tied together by an epilogue quoting a family member along with the occasional formal document of hand written letter relating to the narrative at the end of each sub-set of images. Each sub-set contains a combination of small single page images as well as a double page spread and the occasional blank page to allow for a sort of intermission for the reader.