Two weeks ago, as part of a group critique, I spread out on a table around 100 photocopied 2 x 3 inch prints from my Afon Lwyd project and listened to the class’ responses. There was a range of opinions on offer, mostly positive. This process added a few images to my list of ‘possibles’ and so took me a little further from making a decision about which should be included in my final edit; although it was reassuring to note that my provisional list was not too far from what others thought should be kept on the table.
Tony suggested that I begin to narrow down the likely ‘probables’ by choosing what I saw as the three key images and to build my selection around those. This helped me jettison a few images that made the same point as other (weaker) ones and to remove a few more that did not stand in any clear relation to any other – images that didn’t add anything to the ‘story’.
Andy spent time looking at the arrangement and how the images worked together. As the number of images to include decreased, the almost infinite range of possibilities of how to arrange them opened up.
Over the next few days, taking into consideration the various options that emerged in class, I came up with a further ‘final selection’ of images. I mocked this up into a book and emailed this to Tony and Andy and, on the basis of their further advice, I finally, finally decided on a final, final (draft) Final Edit. In other words, I did not decide anything.
Committing to making a book was what really made the difference in helping me to decide what was ‘in’ and what was not. I am familiar with the process of writing books although this would be my first photobook. Any book has to have a clear, coherent narrative that leads where the author wants the reader to go and which has its own, ‘natural’ rhythm. In this case, the implicit structure of the project (a journey) suggested a literal narrative, describing/ illustrating the various places I visited. The risk would be that the level of detail required would almost certainly have obscured the essence of what I wanted the book to say. It seems that a good photobook, as with other kinds of books, only includes what needs to be there and that expressive truth is more important than literal truth.
Hence, I have included 19 images that reflect my experience of a small part of one South Wales valley. The intention is that the images convey a sense of the emptiness that follows from economic decline; of the greyness that accompanies the weather and the geography of the area but which also makes visible the vibrancy, the edginess, the humour and the personality of a community that is getting on with getting on. The book is not a travel guide. It is my description of a place through which I have travelled.
The book can be viewed on ISSUU.
Despite the prospect of my indecision never reaching its limits, I wish I had had more time to give to this part of the process; to have ‘lived with’ the images a little longer; to see which ones sustained my interest. But this was a short project and will remain, for now, incomplete – in this and other ways.
In my next entry, I will reflect more broadly on what the project has taught me and what sense I make of it in its, for now, final form.
