Photo Books

Sorry, kind of been a while since the last update.  Been spending a lot of time and film photographing friend and family gettogethers, which are more about friends and family than they are about photography, but I found a perfect special case.

A lot of people will tell you that the best place to spend your money and improve your photography is not on gear, but on literature. Photo books tend to run a bit on the expensive side on account of nice color printing and odd sizes and binding, but they're truly worth every dollar if you think about the fact that a print of one of the photos inside could cost thousands of dollars.

I've posted before about context, which is all the things in a photo that give it a who, what, where, when, and why. There is context within every photo. A photo book will give you the context between the photos. Over the course of a book, you can construct a general idea of what the photographer (who is sometimes also the author, but sometimes not) is trying to say not just about the subjects, but about the world as he sees it through his eyes.

And then there are the things that come with just having a physical book.

For Mothers Day this year, my cousin Tiffany proposed that we gather up any photos of ourselves and our family that we had so she could have a photo book printed to give to our grandmother. Grandma had complained that so many people were snapping pictures all the time, and she never got to see any of them (she would have if she had been on Facebook, but being in her eighties without much of an English vocabulary, she is thoroughly excused).

It took repeated reminders from Tiffany over the course of a month or two, but finally we started putting in our submissions.  It was an assortment of old color photos, smartphone selfies, birthday parties, and vacation snapshots

We presented it on Mother's Day and it was a big hit, not just for Grandma, but for everyone there. To be honest, I wasn't expecting it to really bring everyone together like it did.  It had been a long while since any of us physically flipped through a family photo album. My aunts and uncles and cousins passed the book around, each person second glances and noticing new things before handing them over.

The book became a show-and-tell object and people huddled around and crowded in to see what was so funny. We don't have to many reasons to get that close nowadays.  Tiffany had clearly put a lot of effort into arranging the photos and assigning page real estate, creating a progression from snapshots of all of us as confused little kids (and grandma with black hair!) to us as full grown, still-confused adults.

Here are just a few exerpts, provided by various people and taken across many years:

Calvin and his dad

Tiffany's third birthday; I'm on the near right

Me, Tiffany, and my Mom

Christmas.  I'm far right, second from the front

A more recent Christmas

Anyway, it was a fun seeing how far we've all come.  All the way at the back the book, with the caption My grandmother is cooler than yours, a picture of Grandma playing beer pong.