Twyford Down III

When it finally comes time to sequence a book, I have found that making some very small prints that can be dealt out onto the table like a pack of cards is a good way to kickstart what can otherwise seem a daunting task. Twenty-four 7 cm square photos fit nicely onto an A3+ sheet (13" x 19"), for example, which can then be cut up. That way, just two or three sheets will provide a booksworth of prints.

Spread out like this, a lot of things immediately become clearer than they ever would by repeatedly shuffling through a stack of larger prints.

Straight away, you start to see duplicates and obvious pairings for facing pages, and by constant critical scrutiny and re-ordering of the deck the rhythm and shape of a book sequence starts to emerge. The obvious pairings give way to better ones, and the stand-out images start to determine the key points around which the sequence will be hung, as if in a gallery: there's no point in blowing all the best stuff in the first few pages, or keeping it all to last. It also exposes the gaps: there will be missing pictures you need to go back to the files and look for, or even go out again and take. There may not be enough scene-setting images, for example, or too many taken at the same time of year, or in the same place from the same vantage point, and so on. A book, like an exhibition, invites a narrative, even when it's just a book of landscape photographs. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find it.

You might say all this is a waste of time and effort, of course.

For a start – and setting aside the stark fact that hardly anybody will ever buy or handle a copy of your book – hardly anyone other than fellow practitioners appreciates that the contents of a visual book will have been (or ought to have been) arranged with this sort of care and attention to detail. But, in a way, that's the whole point: a well-sequenced book should simply feel right, and be a pleasure to page through. It's not unlike the care someone might take in preparing their appearance – clothes, hair, shoes, accessories – for a big night out; in the end they should just look good and appropriately dressed, no analysis required. People only really notice when some clueless dork like me has turned up to collect the Nobel Prize for Blogging wearing hiking boots, jeans, and a tie-less, un-ironed shirt. What? Why is everybody whispering?

Also, it's quite unusual for anyone actually to page through a book sequentially, front to back, page by page. They'll open it at random, home in on those standout images – oh, I like that one! – and may just glance at the "filler" that doesn't immediately hold their attention. Besides, it's a fact that for left-handers like me it's simply natural to hold a book in your right hand, and let the pages fall from your left thumb starting from the back: to page from the front is simply too awkward. Don't believe me, you righties? Try paging through a substantial visual book from the back without creasing or dog-earing any pages – or even dropping it as the weight flip-flops in your left hand – and you'll see what I mean. These are great arguments for the virtues of the PDF flip-book, of course. [1]

So, unless you're going for some "creative" scrap-book style layout (my advice? Don't...), the really crucial decisions are all about the facing pages. The traditional-but-bland layout for a photobook is to have a single image on the right-hand side, faced by a blank page on the left, possibly with a caption on it or a running title at the top of the page. This looks elegant, saves a lot of effort and handily doubles the page count: convenient if you only have a small number of candidate photos. More interesting, though, I think, is to have at least a few well-chosen pairings of two facing images, and this can often best be achieved not by careful thought but by playing around with those little prints laid out on the kitchen table. Otherwise, how would you ever come up with that serendipitous placing of X next to B, when X next to Z had seemed so obvious at first?

Some variations in image size can engage the attention, too, and, if you're really going for the narrative approach, why not have the occasional page with a couple of small images as a sort of punctuation? In the end, a book is not a portfolio, and visual interest will trump absolute image quality nearly every time. Unless you're thinking of spreading one picture across two pages, with the result that some of it vanishes into the central "gutter"... Again: don't; just don't. It works in magazines, but virtually never works in a book. You can trust me on that one...

But, hey, why listen to me? Go and make your own mistakes! I've got sequencing to do.

1.  I put a lot of effort into sequencing this one, for example, one of my first serious attempts at bookmaking, following my exhibition at Mottisfont Abbey in 2003/4. Whether it works better as a hard-copy book or as a flip-book is an interesting question.