This project has been a whirlwind of emotions, I started it very late due to not having completed my previous project in time, and so I was in between a rock and a hard place. Still, I am so proud of myself for managing to catch up and complete this project!
I have thoroughly enjoyed every single aspect of this project, even though things have been complicated due to the current world circumstances and a couple of personal situations.
I feel this is the beginning of a new era for me as I have discovered my love for working with archive materials and the research behind it all! I have also become a lot more interested in books. I have purchased a number of them, including Susan Sontag’s - ‘Regarding the Pain of other’ and ‘On Photography’. Not only this but I had received a lot of book for Christmas which I hadn’t even touched and only now do I realise the value of them and I am so grateful for them!
I started this project with completely different ideas to what I have finished with. I knew already that I wanted to create a book as my final display as I was aiming to use Jake’s nan’s writing which she is in the process of writing at the moment. I read through the parts that she has, and I took extracts from it and placed them next to photographs which I found in her storage boxes. I never realised how interesting she was until I started this project even though I already had such a secure connection with her. She has had a fascinating life. I feel like I know a whole new side to her, I understand now why she gets so frustrated with her condition as she was once quite an active person who now struggles to even get out of their chair.
My main aim for this project was to show the impact of being diagnosed with such an illness can have on a person. However, once I started doing more research and finding more photographs, it became so much more than just about the disease, it became about her whole life story, which I am pleased about.
I was inspired by several books and photographers throughout the process of this. Still, mostly by Celine Marchbank and Larry Sultan as they both created such exciting and beautiful projects based on their parents, I found my images to hold similar visual aspects to those of Celine Marchbank. I think this is because when she came to give us a talk back in 2018, I was so inspired by her that I wanted to create a project on my nan. Now obviously due to circumstances and as I am not able to currently see my nan, I thought I could use this inspiration and create a project on Jake’s nan, who is also a surrogate grandmother to me. I will still complete a project on my nan as she also had a beautiful life. When looking at Larry Sultans work, he helped me to ease out some of my worried about the book ending up too long or having to much text next to the images. Still, looking through her successful his project was with both these aspects, I realised that as long as it is exciting, which I feel it is, it does not matter of the length, it also demonstrated how Jake’s nan had had a long life.
I had a lot of new ideas by researching several people. Still, Larry Sultan helped me come up with ideas on how they make the book more interesting in terms of layout. I was initially going to just have everyday images next to text. However, I felt that considering Jake’s nan’s life is so different, that the pages needed to hold a similar value.
I had never used text next to images on a project before, and so I was quite nervous about how it would turn out as I worried it might be too long, or I may not find linking images. Then it would make no sense, but I have been fortunate in the fact that almost everything that Jake’s nan had written down I was able to find some sort of evidence from through diaries or photographs or documents.
There are a couple of bits in the book which I would change if I had the right materials, however annoyingly I struggled to find an image of her daughter when she was a baby. I wanted to get a scan of the divorce document; however, we searched high and low in all the rooms. We could not for the life of me find it! I was disappointed, but I think it still works.
A lot of the quotes have not got images next to them because I found out that Jake’s nan destroyed a lot of photos, and so did Chris. So I thought that seen as they wanted so desperately to forget about specific times, keeping the visuals blank help to emphasise the fact that Jake’s nan wanted to blank out certain times.
I feel this is a book I will continue with even after handing it in as I would love to learn more about her history and the later times ahead of her. But overall, this project has been beyond anything I have ever thought I could achieve. I am incredibly proud of myself for coming out the other end and even handing this project in on time. I believe that I will be making more content like this as I enjoyed it so much.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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