Describe photobook in:
3 words: family, culture, migration
A sentence: I will explore the sense of family and migration through my own culture and my mother’s life.
A paragraph: In my photobook I will explore the sense of family and migration through my own mother by showing what it was living in Romania in the early 90s compared to my life in the UK in the 2020s. I will be using a series of portraits of me and/or my mother, as well as images from her photographic archive (photo albums). I’m going to also interview her and find out what it was like moving away from her own country and settling to Jersey, then I’ll add the text to some of the images to tie everything together.
Design your photobook:
I’d like my book to have a hardback cover and either be black & white, or have a neutral/muted colour because I don’t want it to be too distracting. I really liked Laia Abril’s front cover in the book ‘Epilogue’, and I might try do something similar with my mother. It will be in an A4 size and portrait, as it is easier to hold and store that way. The title is going to be formed of only 2 or 3 words, or a short sentence, that will capture the viewer’s eye. I want to write my title on a piece of cloth then stick it on the front cover, just like in Sam Harris’ book ‘The Middle of Somewhere’, in order to give the book more personality and texture.
I want the opening page of the book to have a map of Europe which I will edit and show our journey of migration from Romania to Europe, just like Dragana Jurisic’s ‘YU: The Lost Country’. The layout inside the book will be quite simple with mostly some double spreads and occasional juxta positions of the past and present. I’d also like to add some text on some pages in which I’ll either translate some Romanian writing found on the images, or my mother’s own words.
I really liked the use of inserts from Sam Harris’ book ‘The Middle of Somewhere’ and I think I might do something similar with some journal pages I have found relating to migration and wanting to go back “home”.
Mood-board
