Uses of Photography – Week 11 | Jenny's Media Blog

In the class, Bella talked about if a photobook has a bad design, it may ruin the photographs. A well designed photobook should consider about its size, colour, type of paper, font, layout and more on. There are some key points that I gathered from Gerry Badger’s reading ‘Reading the Photobook’:

The photobook, therefore, is a text in which the principal carrier of meaning is the photographic sequence contained between its covers. (Badger, 2011)

A single photograph can be a text and a photobook can tell a story. It is difficult to read just by looking at one single photograph, but if the photographs are in sequence, the ‘story’ is created. Therefore, it is very important to put the photographs in the right sequence or the viewers may be confused about the story.

If the photobook is a world of its own… it is solely the author’s creation… and is therefore a work of the imagination, a fiction. Strictly speaking, there are no “nonfiction” photobooks, even when the photographic material is nominally of the most “transparent,” documentary kind. (Badger, 2011)

Different viewers can have different imagination on the same photobook. It is essential for the author to create a world in his or her photobook to allow the viewers have their own imagination which beyond what is shown in the book.

There is also the question of “language.” The photobook has become international. Japanese photobooks can be obtained in London or New York (almost) as easily as they can bought in Tokyo. (Badger, 2011)

The language of a photobook is universal. Regardless of any kind of language, the university of the photobook can reach to readers across the globe. The global viewers can read the story through the photograph, if not the text.

My photobook light & shadow playfully illustrates the narrative between light and shadow in using the photographic style of black and white. There are 24 photographs included in the photobook and those photographs are taken during the semester and Easter Break. Here are some sample photos:

This is the cover of light & shadow where I used the shadow of a fork on a white plate to place as background image and I also added the shadow effect on the fonts.

There are different layout in each page of my photobook. As what Bella told us that do not put too many photographs in a single layout, I placed maximum one photograph per page. I chose to make the background black because black is a mysterious colour that provides the feeling of perspective and depth.