Foil Blocking

I have been trying to decide what to do to the front cover of my books and have finally settled on foil blocking. On book I have made in the past I have made dust covers, which I think if not done really well cheapen a book and also screen printed onto the buckram. The screen printing didn't work well last time and is a bit of a lengthy process that I am not really interested in doing again. Foil blocking seemed like the logical choice as it would provide me with a professional finish that I won't have to do myself. I only want the title of the books and my name, positioned centrally on the cover, so screen printing seemed like a lot of extra work for very little gain. Foil blocking will also stand out a bit more if I decide to go for a gold finish. The only downside is that the place I have found to do it are closed all this week so I will not have it done for submission but I can get it done before the exhibition, which is what really matters.

New Title & Title page

London Book



Leeds Book

I decided to go with a different name rather than New British Patriotism. Instead I decided to call both books 'A Tale of Two Cities'. The change was mainly down to the change and shift in the project itself and what I was taking photographs of and why. Originally the project was very much focused around race and multiculturalism and looking to push a sense of a new sense of patriotism that encompasses everyone who call the UK their home. I drifted away from this idea slightly and i wanted a more general title that showed that it was more a journey through two different cities. There are also the connotations that arise through the use of using the same name as the famous Charles Dickens novel. the following quote is from wikipedia that quickly describes the book:

A Tale of Two Cities 'depicts the plight of the French peasantry demoralized by the French aristocracy in the years leading up to the revolution, the corresponding brutality demonstrated by the revolutionaries toward the former aristocrats in the early years of the revolution, and many unflattering social parallels with life in London during the same time period. It follows the lives of several protagonists through these events, most notably Charles Darnay, a French once-aristocrat who falls victim to the indiscriminate wrath of the revolution despite his virtuous nature, and Sydney Carton, a dissipated British barrister who endeavours to redeem his ill-spent life out of love for Darnay's wife, Lucie Manette.'

I think the fact that I became interested in class throughout the project reflects well with the use of the title and what Dickens was trying to portray within his novel.

I also decided to stick with the cover design that used the text over the top of one of the photos. I always knew that I wanted to use the photo of the closed down African Community Link project for my London title page as I thought it was a strong image and raised questions about multiculturalism with in a community. I then managed to find a shop front in Leeds that had a painted Ghana flag on the front and thought the contrast between an open shop and a closed community project was interesting. I also decided to make the text smaller and tried to used the plain space in both images to place it.

Book Development

Buckram



Thread to match

I have now decided on what colours I am using for the covers of my books. I have decided to stick with the green buckram that I have used on my practice books but then contrast this with a blood red colour. I thought both were classic colours and had a very British feeling, which is a bit of an abstract feeling but I guess short of going for white and red or blue, white and red they were colours that worked for me. I still haven't decided what colour is going to be used for what book, I think I will just let that be a unconscious decision when it comes to binding both books. I also managed to find thread to match both colours so I think i will try to make so that the thread is a bit more discreet, as on Japanese binding the thread is left exposed.

'Photoshoping'

Image after using Photoshop



Original Image

I have never claimed to be an expert when it comes to using photoshop and I think that this boils down to the fact that I would rather never have to edit my photos in it. This however raises the problem that I am not a technically advanced enough photographer to not have to use it, especially for a project like this where I wanted the images to look well finished. It has been a bit of a learning curve in terms of using photoshop as I have developed new skill that I didn't have prior to the FMP. I would however had liked to have spent a bit more time on each image as some of them had to be rushed through due to the fact that I hadn't left myself a lot of time towards the end of the project to print the pages.

I think that I wouldn't have been able to use a lot of the images I have if it wasn't for photoshop because some of them were quite under or over exposed and I think that this was down to the fact that it was the first time I had tried shooting people in a documentary style, where you sometimes don't have a lot of time to set up your camera for the shot.

After looking at the Tony Ray-Jones book by Russell Roberts I thought that it would be interesting and important for my project to look at how I write down my plans and keep myself on track. I have a diary that I use to plan my week and make notes along the way. I do have to admit that some weeks I get really into this and then others I don't use it and I end up just writing things down on bits of paper and then keeping them for as long as I need to. It has been an interesting process to look back at how I have planned and to try and understand how successful I was at this. I think it is a bit of a amalgamation of techniques that I use but having a diary definitely helps me out.

Nick Waplington - Double Dactyl

I have looked at other projects by Nick Waplington throughout this research project so I went back to the library to have another look to see what else he had done and stumbled upon this book 'Double Dactyl'. This collection of photographs shows a different side to the project I looked at before due to the fact that only about a third of the photographs feature people in. The images are described in the book as conveying 'a sense of barren desolation, a bleakness made up of washed out colours, forlorn exteriors and empty landscapes mostly taken from the middle distance.' I found myself drawn to these images because even though many of them were dealing with the benign and regularity of things we see all around us they are still captivating and interesting. There are also the themes of community and working class that he is looking at, which link well to my work and I think they are portrayed perfectly by the last photograph above of Bethnal Green Road, which depicts a cross section of a London community.

Tony Ray-Jones

Front Cover



Contact Sheet







Note on photographs and projects



Book mock up





I found this book on Tony Ray-Jones very interesting, not only because of the many images of England from the 1960's but also because it provides a great deal of insight into what Ray-Jones was thinking and his approach towards a project, in terms of planning etc. This can be seen through the various images of his notebooks and filofax pages, where it shows in detail the level of planning involved in most of his photography projects. This got me thinking as to how much I have planned throughout this project. I have set aside specific days to photograph and had a pretty good idea where I was going but apart from that I let myself be relatively free when it came to what images I wanted. The main exception was at the end of the project where I had it in my mind that I wanted an image of a west indian person in Leeds, so I made sure I returned to Chapletown to get the photo I wanted.

The Black House - Colin Jones

The Black House is another really interesting book that deals with the issues of race in and around the time I was looking at in my dissertation (the 1970's - 1980's). This book is a very good documentation of a troubled time in the UK in terms of social issues such as racial integration. 'The Black house' was a halfway house on the Holloway Road in London for young black men who were or had been in trouble with the Police.

This is an extract from an article on the Time Out website that talks about the project in more depth:

'In 1973, Colin Jones (dubbed ‘the George Orwell of British photography’) was commissioned to produce illustrations for a newspaper article about a community project for young black men in Islington. Published by the Sunday Times under the headline ‘On the Edge of the Ghetto’, the story proved explosive and by 1977, when more of Jones’ pictures were exhibited at the Photographers’ Gallery, the media had nick-named the hostel ‘The Black House’.

Though the project was officially called Harambee, the media took advantage of the fact that it was less than a mile away from the so-named lair of black power activist and infamous murderer Michael de Freitas (Michael X), the subject of a high-profile trial in 1972. Jones’ pictures had nothing to do with the site where de Freitas lived, but when news of the hostel broke, the papers resurrected the name.'

More here, very interesting: http://www.timeout.com/london/features/2936/Colin_Jones_and_the_Black_House.html

Black Britain: A Photographic History

Black Britain: A Photographic History is a book of photography compiled by Paul Gilroy who I looked at for my dissertation. It is a very interesting book that documents visually the history of black people living in the UK.

Tom Wood - Bus Odyssey

When I picked up this book i felt like I could immediately relate to it. I really liked the idea behind the photographs as they were all taken in, on and around the bus. The bus is something that everyone uses at some point in their lives and when you think about it is a very weird environment. A lot of the time people are all sitting together but there is very little communication between everyone. This project is described as a look at the 'somewhat banal marginal sides of everyday life.' and that many people on the bus 'embrace each other with the same absent intensity with which the other people on the bus distance themselves from each other'.

I think that this makes for an interesting place to photograph and in essence a challenge. Wood used a Leica camera that had a quieter shutter so that people wouldn't hear his camera as easily. There was also the issue of photographing out the window due to the reflection but in many ways this creates a nice effect as you can see both people outside and inside the bus at the same time.

Martin Parr

Photographs taken from a book looking at an overall selection of Martin Parr's work.









Above photographs are taken from Martin Parr's 'Think of England' book.

I think that Martin Parr was going to be an obvious inspiration for me in this project. We are both dealing with a similar subject matter in England and its people and in many cases taking photographs in very working class areas of working class people in regular day to day activities. There is also a stylistic similarity in terms of the use of bright colour and where possible I have tried to create photographs with a high level of contrast so that they really jump off the page. However I do think there are some major differences between my project and many of his especially that of humour. I have not tried to take funny photographs that are in effect visual puns, which many of Parr's photographs do. This isn't to say that some of my photos do do this but what I think is important is that I didn't intentionally seek to do this and I didn't want my books to have an overarching feeling of humour. I think that before I started actually taking photographs for this project that I had a very Martin Parr image in my head of what sort of photographs I was going to come out with. This didn't really happen when I started to actually go out and meet people and I guess this has been part of the natural progression of the project.