It’s been a while since I last managed a blog!
By Jo Howell 2023
It’s nice to mess around with layouts using hand painted cyanotype shapes. I choose recent images of my time in the yarden. Just general shots from my phone. As part of my sessions at the United reform church for the Cultural Spring, I thought it would be nice for us to create folded books from images made for our photography sessions.
The participants have taken some truly marvellous images over the last few weeks, and I figured we should have something tangible to take home. I got everyone’s images via email, and I printed A6 sized negatives for us to use.
This folded book is created by a single piece of paper, and it is really simple to make, but also still very effective.
The joy of making a zine or folded book is the innumerable ways you can choose to read or display it. It’s completely interactive. Working through the book is a nice sensory adventure.
I think I will create a few versions of this piece, as I feel some of the cyanotypes could be a bit clearer. The slight loss of true focus in some places was because I was using an uneven floor to construct the images. This was because I was teaching, and this was really just a demo piece. The next prints will be made by sandwiching the negs and paper between 2 planes of glass.
If you haven’t tried making one of these then I advise you do! As a small sketchbook exploration you can’t beat it. I’ll make a YouTube video about the process of the next one I create.
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