EDITING PT: 14 - joy of a harvey wallbanger

my home office right now is actually no more than a corner of our baby change room.. i sit at the desktop mac, photoshelter and photographs open to edit live, with beates laptop open on skype to my right... the internet jack is bust so a hairband hooked over the table edge holds it in place.
still..

professionalism is a state of mind and we´re moving in a couple of weeks anyway - firstly to Croatia for 5 weeks where i will be working and onwards.. elsewhere...

but i digress... i caught up with David Alan Harvey on skype today regarding my book and how it is developing.. and, just like his beard, it´s coming along nicely.

with today's call i needed to achieve 2 things - firstly to find a name for the book which unlike the working title of ´decade´ feels irreverent.. as loose and chaotic as the book will be.

the first suggestion was that i wrote lots of single words on a piece of paper and jiggle them around until something settled. what settled was ´world party´ which, without wanting to be disrespectful to them, sounds a little too much like a band from the 80´s who were much adored by those with little interest in music.. (see also ´the lighthouse family´).

¨A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.
~Leopold Stokowski¨

and so a week or two ago i hit the quotation sites on the web and found some cracking quotes which i could cream a couple of words from.. quotes about music..
i mentioned a couple and that led to David telling me that all of Martin Parr's book titles are taken straight off the pages of tabloid newspapers.. superb..

sonar in Barcelona 2000

David then clicked on the photo above - hastily titled ´wasted asleep´, before i banged it away to the magazine client in 2000..
wasted.. wasted youth.. my wasted career.. ´Jesus wept - i was wasted last night´.
wasted.
wasted seems like a good name.. trashy.. evocative and provocative.. it´s the number one title for now.. please suggest if you have one better.

layout was also on my need-to-talk about list.
early on in the process David cast doubt on the idea that i need to include day and night photos - thinking the day snaps simply did not fit my style or point.
however, i have wrestled with it and cannot disregard them.
there are some photos i love which will be left out of the book, such as the one below , because they do not fit aesthetically but i have been unable to discount the day ones simply because of the lack of flash.

san francisco NYE 2001

the trick now is going to be in blending them all without using formal chapters.. and i´m excited to say that i think there is a solution.

we chatted about the book needing to hold some of the energy of the events photographed and how to achieve this.. it cannot be as clean and beautifully gentle as Davids ´divided soul´ because my life, the people in the photos and the events themselves were anything but that.
so there will be 4 or 5 ´breaks´ or visual bookmarks to section off the book..
double pages with upwards of 10 or 15 photos scrambled onto them perhaps, (below), as photographed 6 by 4´s laid on a table or perhaps in a cleaner, patchwork style.


they could then be roughly themed upon the full page photos on the following pages of the book..
a visual break between style, content or aesthetic which will enable the use of day photos and also allow the use of photos which are less suitable for full page use.. snaps that are good for telling the story, but which do not warrant a full page..

following the work chat comes the general chat..
burn magazine..
a 1978 copy of national geographic with some of Davids work..
and teaching, photography and the eternal question of WHY we photograph?

sometimes though it is better not to think why and to simply do.. and i´m certainly glad that i did DO for so many years :ø) really enjoying this book right now..

many thanks again for your help and advice David - it is always motivating and downright fun to chat with you..
d