Printing the text and images for ‘Season To Taste’ created the mildly surreal feeling that this project was going to be fully realised. It is a big step moving work from hard drive and screen to tactile printed paper. Even just on cheap copy paper the imagery looked how I wanted it to and actually better, I felt than it did on screen.
Once the work was laid out I roped in my wife and brother-in-law to talk it through and give me their thoughts. Both understand the project and photography. Initially I had planned to group the ‘manual’ part of the book along with cyanotype images at the front and follow this with a recipe (and photographs) section for the second half of the book. We were unanimous in deciding that the book worked better with relevant recipes following each section in turn. It was also agreed that the cyanotype images disrupted the flow in a pleasing way, causing the viewer / reader to pause and consider what they were seeing. It was also agreed that mixed images work well for just that reason and, in fact, increases appreciation of the food photographs.
Laying the work out in this way highlighted a few gaps where more cyanotypes are needed to balance the ‘straight’ photography. It was also suggested that an ‘end note’ would be useful to summarise the work and highlight the gap in knowledge / understanding of food and cookery that exists today.
I will also research different genres of books, photography and art and analyse how different images are sequenced.
Robin Stewart 