the making of
hello there,
if you're seeing this you probably have my photo diary with you. i would encourage you to finish with it first before taking a look at this page, but if you prefer otherwise, that works too. no hard and fast rule to how this goes about.
only thing i ask of you is that because this book is so personal to me, i hope you would be able to enjoy this entire experience by finding a quiet space and thumbing through this w/o distractions (hopefully, lah).
i miss climbing. i missed climbing enough for me to look through old vids to (try) relieve this emptiness. in doing so i decided to just make screengrabs, print them out and allow myself to 'climb' around at home.
it was also a means for me to dig deep into my emotions and find a way to express it using whatever little resources i had at hand. for example, the image titled 'insomnia necrosis' (wrt to my struggles sleeping) i kinda knew i wanted it to be shot at the scene of crime (hur hur), so i'd spend time with the cutout in the kitchen finding the best spot to make the image.
whether you are able to extrapolate or not, each image is conceived from and draws meaning from an episode/struggle/thought.
cutouts i played around with everyday
experimenting with diff cutouts on objects that mean sth
been a few good years since i've worked this beast of a printer (the epson 807) so i wasn't very sure whether it would hold up the entire production. safe to say, still as solid as ever.
decided to use a notebook i got from tokyo for this publication, but also experimented with printing on different papers (colors, thickness, textures) retrieved from very old notebooks (the one you see on the left was from '08?) and some fancy paper i got in '17 and '18 as inserts.
because the paper from the notebook is smaller than a5, i couldn't put it through my printer which is why you see it being washi taped on a thicker gsm a4 paper.
-
it was a lot of trial and error (!!) trying to get the best alignment on the a4 paper and also figuring out which paper would work best vis-à-vis the mood i wanted to convey and print quality amongst others.
pictured on the right is my messy desk space during production.
oh! apart from paper, i also played around with different types of tape - washi tape, climbing finger tape, duct tape, double sided tape.
really tried to make good use of everything i had at home!
a lot of hands-on work went into this. no fancy binding - merely threaded embroidery floss through four holes, tied them together, and used duct tape on the spine.
not the best with penknife but tried to keep my lines straight.
well, production quality wise defo isn't 10/10 - not what you get if you send your work out to the printers to do the job. but i was also sure i didn't want it to be flawless. i preferred for it to stay true to the essence of the book and keep a certain intimacy and imperfection to it.
if you've noticed, there's no title to this project either. i thought long and hard about it and i'm happy to leave it as such for now, because.. really, diaries/journals got no title one, right?
not quite sure how this publication would eventually evolve but i'll still be penning my thoughts in the brown book whenever i get it back.
we'll see.