Every book starts as a pile of photographs on a hard drive. At that stage it is not a book. It is a problem.
The photographs were taken across months, sometimes years. They were taken in different lights, in different moods, with different intentions. The job is to find the thread that makes them a single thing.
The edit
The first cut is brutal. A thousand images become two hundred. Two hundred become fifty. Fifty become the book.
What gets cut is not always what is bad. Sometimes the strongest image has to go because it pulls in the wrong direction. The book needs to breathe as one piece, not as a collection of highlights.
Painting comes last
Once the sequence is set, painting begins. Not on every page — sometimes on one, sometimes on none. It depends on what the photographs leave unfinished.
Painting is the slowest part. It has to earn its place on the page. When it works, you stop seeing the photograph and the paint separately. They become one surface.
What the printer does not tell you
Paper changes everything. The same image on coated stock and on uncoated stock are two different images. Matte coating kills contrast. Glossy coating kills texture. Eggshell is the compromise that feels least like a compromise.
You only learn this by printing badly a few times.
The gap
Between the idea and the object there is always a gap. The gap is not a failure — it is where the work actually happens. The book you end up with is never the book you imagined, and that is usually a good thing.
More notes from the studio soon.