Book 1

Kessels, E (2012) In almost every picture, Amsterdam: KesselsKramer

 The book is roughly A5 in size, so quite small but a nice size to be able to hold and look through.
In this book all of the images are on the Right page and full bleed. The text is on the left page, and centered half way down the page and on the left. This is recurring all the way through, except for 15 images which are double page full bleed.

I like that the images are all on the right page. The composition of each photograph is almost exactly the same each time which means that you can hold the book and flick through it viewing almost all of the images with ease. If the viewer is in a bit of a hurry it is easy to just flick through and not have to spend time moving the book, yet if you do want to spend time with the images the touching page is mostly blank so this is not distracting to the photographs.
The text however is really far away from the photograph so it can feel a little disjointed, however it is the same on each page so the flow is not broken.

 The text that is matched with each image is kept simple. It states the month, year, exact place and geographical place that the image is taken. The project runs from 1980 until 2012 so I think it is nice to be told the date of each image because as a viewer it is then easy to compare photographs but also it feels like we are being taken on a journey with the couple.

The text which explains the book and the imagery is on the very back page. This is quite interesting as it means that the viewer has to first look through the book and make up their own mind about what is going on and then when getting to the end the photographer tells them what they were trying to portray through the book. This means that the photographer has not given the viewer an idea in their mind before viewing the books, meaning that it is fresh and probably more interesting to the viewer.

It feels very similar to looking back through family photo albums, time has passed between each photograph and it is interesting to notice the changes not just to the place and space but also to the subject that is present in each image.



I think that this layout would work with my images. I could place one child on each double page, and on the text page I would include name, age and school year. However, if it were the same on each page, I wonder if that would take away from the point of me wanting to give them the sense of being a person, being an individual rather than considered always as a generalized group. Perhaps the images would need to be in a more random aesthetic to stop them being too repetitive.