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...