Books Without Words

The other night in class we talked about making books using only photographs. We were all given the same sampling of photos and told to make our own individual stories using an accordion spine.

The first picture (below) reminded me of the forming of cells to create life. Using that as inspiration, I decided to make a book about my life in pictures.

The explosion (shown right) expresses my birth.

These panels represent times of turbulence and confusion.

Here is a sampling of the photographs.  

The end of the book, where I start to form my own life as an adult on my own path.

I liked this exercise a lot. For next week's class, we are to make another book on our own using only photographs. It's somewhat challenging to leave words out of a book; it almost feels unnatural. But it really helps you start to see things in a different way.   

Sample Work

If there's one thing I've learned in the past year, it's that books with all types of materials. Below please view some samples of my work from the past year.

Artist Interview Book

This book was inspired after meeting and interview a mosaic artist living in Baltimore. The assignment was simply to create a book. There rules were pretty loose.  I decided to create a mosaic so I could fully understand the artist before writing a feature story.

Art Exhibit Book

This book was inspired after spending one hour at an art exhibit in DC. I sketched a photograph taken by Ansel Adams of a carved wall in California. I then took the photo I sketched and carved it onto chalkboards, which serves as the front and back of the food. The inside stories focus on individual names on the carving.

Book about a Color

The assignment for this book was to write about a color using text and images. I decided to make a create-your-own adventure book that starts with the first envelope.

The story can go in one of two directions. Number 7 is missing at the moment.

Daily Journal

I made all of the above books and this journal in the same course. The assignments for the journal varied from week to week, but we were able to take this in many directions.

Lifesavers

Using some lines from this story I wrote, I decided to make an accordion book from a box of Cheerios. 

I posted the original story on the side of the box and an accordion containing words pours from the mouth of the box. This represents the way a box of Cheerios is poured into a bowl. Like this:

When I was trimming the words for each panel, they got mixed up into a pile. I was really annoyed by this at first. But then I thought about this boy and his "disease" that's noted in the story. I put disease in quotes because the boy does not have a disease. This is what his mother calls it because she doesn't know how else to label it. On the outside, he's a normal, good and wholesome, like the box of Cheerios. But on the inside, things are mixed up. I placed the words out of order to represent his inner emotions. The words follow a pattern on the accordion.

But at one place, they are different and double up.

This represents the boy's gene mutation on the inside of his body. This is where his "disease" stems from.

There is only one lifesaver on a strand of Cheerios.

It seems that the one thing that's different about this boy might be the one thing that's saving him from being just like everybody else, another box of Cheerios, another little boy. 

Complications: With any book, there are complications in the creation. I intended to have these words pour out of the box at once - like cereal. But upon further investigation, I realized that most people read from top to bottom. I had my words coming from the bottom to the top. With the entire strand unraveled, they would have to read backward if reading top to bottom. I purposely taped the top shut so readers had to pull the words out one at a time. I justify this by saying that like cereal, you don't know what you're going to get.

Overall: The idea behind this assignment was to use different materials while still using one of the forms we learned in class. The accordion book is, to my knowledge, one of the most basic styles. I liked using food and having a literal representation in book form. I also like the way this book evolved over the course of my creation. This is not entirely what I imagined at first, but I am happy with the results.

About

Lobster Books is a place for my bookmaking. It is a collection of the books I've made with details about the my intentions, my processes and the final executions. It is the Brother Blog to On a Lobster Placemat, where I blog about food and healthy living. It is a sibling of Alphabet Fruit, where I write microfiction about the food I create and enjoy. This is another part of the Lobster Family, otherwise known as a collection of my personal and professional interests - writing, publishing and healthy living. Sometimes these are all combined. Sometimes they are not. The Lobster Family continues to grow over time.