Lately I have been going down the rabbit hole of fonts and book layouts creating the bones of my book. However, a productive one to one with my project supervisor offered a chance to come up for air and to do a little research into what other photographers are doing and how.  

Revisiting the work of Alejandro Cartagena’s and in particular the book ‘A small guide to homeownership’ is a useful view of how a book can be constructed with a less formal way. Cartagena has crammed thirteen years of work into this book, including fragmented cities, which for me was, in part, inspiration for this project. The use of contemporary images set against kitsch vintage imagery, alongside the books text, offer the viewer immediate linkage to the idea of home and domesticity. The use of colour and black and white photography is used to identify the difference between historical, research images and Cartagena’s own photographs. This method only become apparent when properly viewing the book.  

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Within my own practice I draw upon many forms of research; historical documents, such as plans, tenders and contracts, research papers, books, and social media posts. Each have their own identity and as such I want to be able to show this in my work, this could simply be the use of the same font or layout to matching paper stock. Likewise, the positioning of text with photographs plays a key role, does the text sit above or below the image? Is this format too stale? The text I plan to use for this body of work is taken from the government English Housing reports, which links past housing policies with hard facts about our current housing conditions.  

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Looking at a few of the books produced by Hoxton press from photographers such as Chris Dorley Brown’s ‘Corners’ and Sophie Harris-Taylor’s ‘Sister’ in which each book adopts a similar format of placing the text on the facing page. This very simplistic style looks clean and contemporary as apposed to the ‘text book’ style of picture with text below, which would work well with the majority of the formal image text.

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References  

Fig 1 Tim Beale 2021 ‘Untitled’ from The right to this city

Fig 2 Alejandro Cartagena ‘ A small guide to homeownership’ 2020 https://tienda.alejandrocartagena.com/product/a-small-guide-to-homeownership/ [Accessed 10.10.2021]

Fig 3 Tim Beale 2021: Mock up for handbound book and research on books

Fig 4 Chris Dorley-Brown ‘The Corners’ 2018https://www.hoxtonminipress.com/collections/books/products/the-corners [Accessed 10.10.2021]

Fig 5 Sophie Harris-Taylor ‘Sisters’ by 2017 https://www.hoxtonminipress.com/collections/books/products/sisters [Accessed 10.10.2021]