So this week I had the first of my one to one meets with my supervisor Laura.
A really useful session, not without its challenges because she’s thrown some questions and ideas into the pot that I’d never given any previous thought to but I can see by considering these things it will help me narrow the focus and establish the final purpose of my FMP.
So as I’m about to embark on a long in distance but short in time road trip around New Mexico I’ll have plenty of thinking time to work this out.
Laura suggested I look at the work of Eamonn Doyle, a Dublin based photographer working primarily in street based photography and oh my gosh I am an instant fan.
For the purposes of my project I was very interested to examine how Doyle uses the lines he purposefully build into his compositions to also arrange his images in printed form.
His book productions are varied and collaborative. End pictured above was produced in 2016 as A collaborative work by Doyle, Niall Sweeney and David Donohoe as well as Doyles images it also features drawing and sound by Sweeney and Donohoe.
“End. gives equal significance to the city and its population, their combined forces continuously shaping each other. Individual journeys of everyday life are compacted repetitively into the same streets. Dubliners wear away at the autonomy of their city, while the streets themselves become a kind of sculptural civic mental State. Dublin, its light and its people, carry out dance-like actions, swapping roles in a series of short plays. End. unfolds as a sequence of events — loops of time and place — revealing a city whose concrete is as plastic as the movement of its inhabitants”
Taken from the artists website heres a description of Ends components.
“End. is a set of 13 sections all brought together in a white leatherette slipcase, with black-embossed drawings and tip-in title sheet, wrapped in yellow cellophane.
Each section is folded to 200 x 280 mm, portrait.
Featuring 273 photographs, 20 ink drawings and a 7” vinyl sound work, these 13 Dublin “moments” comprise:
One yellow book, thread sewn, printed in black duotone with screen-printed drawings.
Two black books, thread sewn, printed with silver inks.
Three full-colour books, thread sewn, with screen-printed drawings.
Four concertina-folded double-sided diptychs in full-colour with screen-printed drawings.
One large full-colour double-sided folded map.
One 7” vinyl record tucked inside a printed and folded glassine poster.
At the centre of the work is a concertina-folded double-sided full-colour triptych.”
So whilst I simply dont have the resources to even attempt something this complex I love the idea of the loose leaves and as Laura has drawn attention to the way he uses the lines in his images to form the page compositions which he has carried on as a theme with this new book, Made In Dublin.
In this image he rephotographs the same location with different subjects walking through and collages them interspersed with completely different images yet maintaining a connection through the compositional elements.
Again this is an approach I will also consider and experiment with. These executions make good use of the gutters in the DPS format too.
