I had an intense discussion last night with someone over the ‘Exotic’ series. They come from the ‘art’ side of the tracks, with no real awareness of the photographic tradition. He really liked the trips, he’s even going to be buying a big print of one, but he expressed disapointment with the latest work. His main criticism was that it lacked the impact of the trips, and that the individual images ‘disappeared’ as I didn’t allow the images to connect formally.

Now that is exactly a design feature, not a flaw.

The task I set myself was this…

1. How do you present a series on a wall that allows individual images to be ‘read’ in the same way as you can read images in a book.
2. How can you present the images so that each component image is complete in and of itself, whilst allowing the connections between the individual parts be relationships of content, without allowing the possibility of the strong graphical connections that were such an inherent feature of the trip project.

In 1. I’m thinking specifically of the wonderful books produced by Silvia Plachy. I really must do a post about her. But the strength of her books is the way you flip back and forth seeing thematic connections between pictures. I can’t imagine that these would work well as individual images on a wall.

The ‘Exotic’ project is about categories of ‘things’ . The almost square format was eventually chosen to give almost equal weight to each element, and that, unlike a linear reading, allowed constant reference to be made between each element.

I tried many arrangements, images of different sizes spaced over a canvas, dips, trips, each collection having a different layout. The move from dips to the square was a huge leap forward for me that allowed me to see ways out of potential deadends I sensed coming up.

In the end the ‘almost square’ seemed to work best. The almost mechanistic choice of the same format concentrates on the images without allowing the page layout to become too much part of the work.

Anyway, it is a work in progress so I’ll probably change my mind at a later date…