The past two weekends have been pretty intense, the first being the LACP Exposure Weekend immediately followed by subsequent weekend that was an extended workshop on self-examination. So you could saw that one weekend was listening to others and the other was listening to myself. And both weekends are impacting how I examine my project Gardening For Ordnance.
While discussing my preparations for the LACP Exposure Weekend, I mentioned that I have developed a book dummy for Gardening For Ordnance, but I had not provided much information about it, with only some earlier hints. At this time for the LACP event I was more concerned about the visual concept than getting the page count correct or including either an intro or afterword. One of the book design aspects that I was interested in hearing about related to the essays; was one needed? And if so, where.
The book-dummy was not bound and the interior pages were paper-clipped together. Next time I will tape the pages together as the paper-clips were an awkward mess while being reviewed and an unwanted distraction to the flow of discussion. I did have an opportunity to get some feedback on my book-dummy from two book designers and one publisher, Kris Graves of Kris Graves Projects (below). I will have to say that Kris asked the most challenging questions and provided a lot of food for thought. Essentially, if my project is about the buried ordnance as a potential danger, why don’t the photographs provide more visual tension that hints at danger? hmmmm.
The following weekend was about personal introspection and why I act/react the way I do. One discover I found out that potentially relates to the Gardening For Ordnance project is that I have a lot more anxiety that I had ever imagined. And during the weekend I realized that my photographic project Gardening For Ordnance has been probably subconsciously investigating that critical aspect of anxiety. Something that I could not put my finger on, the tip of the tongue kinda of thing.
Suffice to say, the cumulation of the two weekends has me rethinking the project. I have already re-worked one the images, which is now on the book-dummy cover (version #2). And I have some ideas of other tweaks and changes I want to incorporate. I am not exactly starting from ground zero as a do-over, but I am certainly looking at this body of work with a different pair of glasses. I think that I need to introduce a lot more visual tension.
Featured photograph; Gardening For Ordnance, book-dummy version 2 copyright 2019 Douglas Stockdale
Cheers!
Singular Images 