Most of the books I make are private. A family commissions one, prints two dozen copies and hands them out at Christmas — and the last thing a client wants is her mother’s funeral on a stranger’s website.
So this one is a composite. The design and the structure are exactly what I build; the family is assembled from several, across different interviews and different decades, so that nobody’s private book is on display here.
What it shows is a form. Not a memoir with photographs added — a book in which the prose, the photographs, the documents and the white space are all carrying the story at once. A passport page does work no paragraph can do. A caption can tell you how to look at a photograph, and turn an ordinary snapshot into evidence.
