Saturday 16 May 2020

Four by Four by Four



Making paired pages is easy enough. It's quite fun, too. As you repeatedly scan through a large collection of images (well over 600 in this case) you gradually acquire a deepening awareness of them: an intimacy that is very different from familiarity. Echoes, affinities, and contrasts start to emerge, and an organic sense of their interconnections begins to grow. What starts as a simple matching process – "this one looks like that one" – gradually becomes something less mechanical: this one does obviously go with that one, but – wait! – it has a more interesting resonance with that other one, and this one really makes that first one sing, and so on, and so on. As a way to pass the time during a lockdown, it's hard to beat; a sort of open-ended, improvisational game of Patience.

One slightly uncanny phenomenon that I have been noticing is that a filename-sort of the items in the directory of "selected" items often brings good potential pairings together, side by side – quite often photographs taken in different years with different cameras. Wooo! I have no explanation for this, other than it's possible that proximity may induce affinity, entirely in the viewer's mind. We are connection-making creatures, after all. On the other hand, these pictures generally only become neighbours in the sort when the intervening deadwood has been cleared away. It's strange.


However, I find that the next step, sorting them into a book sequence, is neither easy nor fun. It requires a different level of effort and commitment, and a certain amount of projection into the mind of a potential reader. Will they be bored by too many pairs in the same orientation ("portrait" vs. "landscape") in a row? Are "mixed" pairs (portrait plus landscape) more or less satisfying to the eye? Which are the five-star pairings, and where should they be deployed? Should some single images, and perhaps even some texts be included to break things up a bit? And at what point will I realise that creating Kodachrome 2.0 is a silly idea and that I should be going my own way? These are not essentially photographic or aesthetic considerations, but may be the most important choices, if the final book is to be a success as a book.


To help with this task, I have been creating and printing out A3+ sheets (13" x 19") onto which a four by four grid of dummy page-spreads has been arranged. My intention is to cut these up into individual spreads, if only to disrupt that curious "proximity breeds affinity" phenomenon, but I must admit I do quite like the way they look, unsorted and uncut. This may simply be because a simultaneous, poster-style view of multiple images is a way of avoiding the hard work of deciding on a single, serial, book-style presentation. Perhaps some kind of random ordering process will give the best of both worlds?

So far, I have filled four and a half sheets, which will be a book of around 150 pages unless some further selection is applied. As ever, the choice is between creating something substantial and something affordable. Given no-one will buy the thing, anyway, I suppose it might as well be substantial. Perhaps even a sixth sheet would not be excessive...


5 comments:

Kent Wiley said...

Hungh... Fun looking for patterns, since viewing this on a tablet doesn’t allow for inspection of actual content. What I do notice is the first 4x4 set might have a “better” consistency if you included one more landscape/portrait pairing in the sequence of those (between the two portrait/landscape bookend pairs), and dispose of one of the five landscape/landscape pairs that leads into this group. Good god, so many words of a possibly misconstrued nature to describe a simple visual pattern. Very frustrating. But thanks for sharing.

Mike C. said...

Kent,

Interesting, isn't it? These sheets are actually pretty much random, each individual page-spread added to the sheet as it was made, with no thought to what went with what.

Mike

Kent Wiley said...

That is interesting. It probably says something about the superficiality of my brain, but looking at these 4x4 images I see them as a single image with a bunch of blobs of color. They're not large enough to see the individual images, so they all become a part of a single image. There is too much information to look at the individuals, trained as we are by years of speeding through web pages for eye catching bits. But since you're going to cut them into pairs, they'll once again become individual images. A fun visual exercise.

Mike C. said...

Kent,

I don't mean to be insulting, but you have tried clicking on them, haven't you?

Mike

Kent Wiley said...

Yeah, believe it or not, I have! True confessions time: in this instance I prefer the thumbnails as originally presented to me on an iPad. I'm too lazy to inspect each image, so look for the patterns in the overall collection of each 4x4 group. Sorry to have to admit to being such a philistine. You know, eyeball time, and all that.