Postcards 2

I made a quick trawl through the blog looking for potential "postcards" and, as I thought, there are quite a few: over 600, in fact. By a "postcard", I mean any photograph that I thought was worth posting at the time, that has kept a high level of "stand alone" interest in its own right, and ideally has not previously been collected into a book or series. Six hundred is more than plenty to play with: I'd hope to end up with about 200 or so, probably arranged in facing pairs, probably using Blurb's cheaper "magazine" format.

As a first run at sequencing them into a book, I have started dragging thumbnail-sized images onto A4 pages in Photoshop Elements. Like any sorting exercise, the trick is simply to get started, without any preconceptions, or commitment to the initial results. As with doing a jigsaw, you will gradually gain a deepening familiarity with what is on the table, so to speak, and begin to spot family resemblances, compelling juxtapositions, and – unlike a jigsaw – start to rank and discard individual images and pairings; the ruthless editing process has begun. You can get about 15 or 16 pairs on an A4 page, and I have so far completed five pages: that's already a book of 150+ pages, at one photo per page. However, there is still a lot of gold in that heap of sand, and plenty of scope for recombinations. It's an enjoyable game, especially in a "lockdown" situation.

As I indicated in the previous post, my intention is not to discover or implant some deep current of meaning running through these pictures, which can be brought out for the viewer's edification by the subtlety of my sequencing. There is none; they're pretty random, and are not "about" anything, other than a repeated affirmation of the classic photographer's credo: Look, I saw this! Also, as I and I'm sure many others have said in the past: there is an important distinction to be made between a picture of something – behold, the Eiffel Tower – and a picture made from something: I think of Henri Rivière's wonderful series of lithographs, Thirty-six Views of the Eiffel Tower, 1902 [1], all of which feature the Tower somewhere within the frame, but few of which are primarily about the Tower.

Similarly, in the best of my own chosen photographs the subject matter will almost always be subordinate to the way it has been seen. Yes, the pictures will have been deliberately paired by me, partly because I find that a satisfying arrangement on the page, but also because it invites another dimension of "seeing", if only by sometimes disrupting some more immediate, superficial reading. In the same way I will be paying attention to the "flow" of the sequence, not to establish any narrative, as such, but simply because that will make for a more satisfying book. To repeat what I said before, I hope that an essential energetic randomness will be its main virtue: charging the air so that meaning can occur, rather than attempting to create and control some message or manifesto.

Wait, isn't that the Eiffel Tower?

1. The 2010 reprint of this book is still widely available, and I thoroughly recommend it to anyone with an interest in graphic art, japonisme, or indeed belle époque Paris and the construction of the Eiffel Tower.