… I hope! At last I can look at the Via Miracoli book without having a head ache afterwards! What a nightmare editing is… Last week I attended the lecture held by John E. & Patrick S. on book publishing and one point Patrick mentioned was, that producing a book involves a great deal of STRUGGLE. Hell yes, can I relate to that! Just about everything is difficult in book making; it starts with the beginning of a book which is in a way pure insanity… Which photograph “sucks” the viewer in? What do you write to intrigue the viewer? Two questions - many answers and possibilities, too many maybe, hard decisions to make.
I had a great editing session with Maria from last years full-time MAPJD and she was pretty ruthless, straight forward and her honest opinion was very helpful. Through that meeting I gained so much more clarity. Later on that same day I came across Ken Schles’ work and his cult book “Invisible City” and that had a break through effect on me. I was looking at it (online only) and it gave me the courage to follow my innermost feelings about the Via Miracoli project and to actually represent my feelings about Naples as a city. From early on I wanted to make a visual poem and in one tutorial with Ed Kashi & with his help I managed to define my motivation for this project as a homage to Naples. Though I must be clear here - I don’t want to do this homage in a naive way, Naples is not an easy place and there are a few things which I find really bad about this city! Obviously it is the rubbish problem the city has been facing since the 1970’s I’d like to address. I want to integrate this photo of a rubbish dump, but how to do this was (or maybe still is) a whole other question… For now, I thought to place it between a religious shrine and a photo that shows the clean street - “good and bad” is very close to each other…. always…
And how do I want to represent these other, more uplifting, feelings visually? Every time I am going back to Naples it feels like a new adventure and it became paramount to follow this notion for the book design. It is on the experimental side, demanding and maybe even a bit disturbing - and this is exactly how Naples feels for me… I just can not imagine to go for a “quieter” book layout, it would feel wrong. Why trying to pretend something else? I definitely wouldn’t be happy about it and one thing that resonates, is, the advise we received, what ever subject we choose, we should be passionate about our final project & that it is this very passion that can make the body of work strong… not that this makes it all easy, of course, so much more is involved in the process next to passion.
But there you go, this is where I am at now. There is still a lot to do, there are a few more photos I will have to say good bye to, up dating the sequencing, placing and spacing plus the texts… ohh, those words which I still have to squeeze out of my brain….! They only come sporadically, wave-like and unexpected and I always have to hurry writing it down and not to forget them immediately.
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