MODELS FOR A VISUAL NOVEL

I’ve experienced a connection between books and cinema for as long as I can remember. When I design a book it’s the immersive, spatially dynamic and forward moving quality that I’m interested in. What I’ve discovered is that these qualities are not something imposed on books from movies but an untapped potential inherent in the codex form itself.

I’ve been searching for a specific kind of book that combines image and text with the object quality of the codex into a novel-like extended narrative. Not having found the book I’m after I’m now engaged making the kind of book that I’ve always wanted to read.

Over the past several years I have developed two separate, but related, studio practices that have helped expand my understanding of narrative potential of sequential images in books.

The Postcard Books, are the result of intensive typological collecting, sorting, mixing, matching and arranging of uniform-sized picture postcards into sequences. I’ve explored the collage-effect when two images are juxtaposed as a spread. With the Folded Books, I alter existing, primarily visual, books to create chance juxtapositions that help illuminate the grammar of images, like how the meaning of a specific image changes in relation to the space of the page.

I started this as a form of drafting or prototype-making, a way of understanding what it is that I find compelling about specific image juxtapositions or sequences, but I’ve come to understand these activities now as a form of visual writing.
Writing with images.

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In December 2019 I delivered a paper about my work-in-progress at the conference Memory, Word and Image: W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies (The Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture at the University of Amsterdam).

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My essay Writing with Images on the sequential and cinematic qualities of visual books was published in Issue 192 of the journal Amphora, adapted and expanded from the talk I gave at The Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada. It is available here: www.alcuinsociety.com/amphora