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To me, identity is a collection of traits that you choose to present yourself with at the present moment. For example, some people will choose to lean into their gender identity by dressing completely out of the binary. Or some people will present their religious identity through the daily practices they partake in. I feel as though identity is personal, though. I may believe that different aspects of me are central to my identity than somebody else believes are. I don't feel as though it's really possible to list out a group of traits that you can permanently identify with, as it's so subjective. Identities are constantly changing as we are too, for example, social or political identities can change quite a bit, as well as sexual and gender identity.
However, I do feel that we are born with certain identity traits, like our race/ethnicity and, for a portion of our lives, our class or gender, and we don't get a say in how these identities are responded to or, to an extent, how we want to present them.

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- Photographer whose work mainly consists of analogue candids exploring themes within the LGBTQ+ community, such as the HIV crisis and the opioid epidemic

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- Self-portrait photographer that explores femininity, particularly of women in Japan, often by presenting herself as different characters, occasionally of a different cultural identity.

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Jewish American photographer, famous for black and white analogue portraits of marginalised people.

Initially, her and her husband ran a commercial photography business together, where she took the role of the art director and her husband as the photographer. She eventually quit this business upon studying alongside street photographer Lisette Model.

Her subjects predominantly included trans people, circus performers, and people with mental illness.

She was interested in people who were visibly creating their own identities

'The Cut' credited her as one of the most radical photographers of the 20th century, saying her notability is down to both her work and her personal life - being a woman in the 1900s going through a divorce, suffering from depressive episodes, putting herself in dangerous situations for her art, then ultimately going on to commit suicide.

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https://mackbooks.co.uk/collections/bestsellers/products/paul-s-book-br-collier-schorr
- A collaboration between 55-year-old American photographer Collier Schorr, and 23-year-old French model Paul Hameline. The photobook explores themes of youth and sexuality.
- I really love how the book feels a bit like a scrapbook, with excerpts of writing and scanned in notes and being shot on film. I feel as though it tackles age well through its design too, being shot on an analogue camera but also having screenshots of an iPhone. The layout of this book is also something I haven't really seen before. I see a lot of photobooks that have pretty consistent layouts throughout, whereas this one has full-page spreads, double-paged spreads, collages, and uses a lot of white space.
- The cohesion of the colours used in the book is something that I take inspiration from for my project too - I really want my photos to bond together visually through their colours.

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Front cover

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back cover

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An Attic Full of Trains - Alberto di Lenardo & Carlotta di Lenardo

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An Attic Full of Trains - Alberto di Lenardo & Carlotta di Lenardo

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https://mackbooks.co.uk/collections/bestsellers/products/an-attic-full-of-trains
- Sequenced by his granddaughter, this is a photobook of 50 years of a mans memories across the world.
- I like the way this book tackles themes of identity, as I feel as though the obvious response to identity up until now was to photography actual people, whereas this one feels more like it was capturing memories.
- I really like the design and layout of this book, in terms of how it's entirely made up of landscape photos. I like how the layout takes into account the different colours, places etc. in each image to determine their place in the book.
- I like the front and back covers of this too, I feel like it has a bit of an old feel to it with how it's made of brown paper. I also like the double cover, I don't think I've seen that sort of thing before.

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https://photobookstore.co.uk/collections/photobooks-by-women/products/utatane
- An exploration of the details of everyday life that are easily missed.
- I like this a lot. I like the muted colour palette as well as the theme of the photos.
- I feel as though this is something similar to the ideas I wanted to explore, as I was thinking about something along the lines of how mundane the area I live in is, yet there's still a lot of cool stuff and I still really love it.

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https://photobookstore.co.uk/collections/recent-arrivals/products/dream-moons
- Telling a story of a journey, solely within the artists own home.
- My favourite thing about this is the creativity put into it. I like that it was photographed solely within his home as I was unsure as to whether I'd be able to get out to take photos, so it's quite inspiring how he was able to come up with so many interesting compositions despite the burden.

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The overall theme of my photobook is the place I identify with and the feelings of isolation that came with it.  The only places I've ever lived are Croydon and, very briefly, Southwark.

I aimed to capture the less noticeable/plain things I saw, yet the things I still thought looked cool or interesting. I wanted to focus a lot on lines, shapes, and patterns as opposed to focussing on whole scenes (?) however, I have put in a few images of these.

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A few of the photos were shot on film, however the majority were shot on a DSLR. I attempted to edit them all to look similar, as though they were shot on analogue, because I wanted it to feel more honest. The original goal was to shoot the photos on film, but this didn't go to plan due to my lack of experience with analogue cameras.

The first half of the book is photographed in Croydon, where I grew up, whilst the second half is in Southwark, where I moved to recently. I wanted to capture feelings of isolation to reflect my feelings about these places, particularly as I had it in my mind that I would move away and finally feel some sense of freedom, however, this wasn't the case. Initially, I wanted to split the book into two halves for each of these places, but I decided against this as ultimately I felt exactly the same in my new home as I did my old.

I specifically wanted to make sure that there were no people seen in my photos, because I wanted the subject solely to be the place instead of the people. I feel like with the brief 'identity' the obvious route to go down could have been photographing people, so originally I wanted to create a book of people, or none whatsoever.

The photos were lightly inspired by An Attic Full of Trains and Utatane, where both photographers chose to capture mundane parts of life because they still contributed to their personal lives. I edited them in black and white after having seen Yurian Quintanas Nobel's photobook above. I feel like it makes the images look so much more impactful than just seeing them in colour.

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After my tutorial with Kalina, she mentioned using elements from the places photographed in the actual photobook. This is something I want to experiment with, and I've thought about either adding in random objects scattered throughout the book or pages of them grouped together, perhaps in colour?

I feel as though the odd pages of collections of these objects could work better in the theme of the book, as although I'm focusing on isolation, I could show these elements of familiarity in colour.

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I ultimately decided on using a couple of pages of scattered objects and playing around with blend modes on InDesign. Due to the quality of the scan, the background was still a bit grainy so I just decided to remove it (+ some of the dirt) in Photoshop and I think this looks a lot cleaner.

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During the Photoshop session with Kalina, I experimented a bit with editing the colours in my photos. I tried this only on a couple of them but ended up deciding I preferred the entire black and white image instead because I don't like how unnatural (??) it looks. Whilst I want my photobook to look handmade and a bit grungy, I feel like editing the photos in the wrong way is gonna make it look tacky instead.

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I've designed a couple of variations of covers as I've developed my photobook. Initially, I wanted the cover to be the one pop of colour through the entire book, however now I'm leaning more towards the only colour being from the trash that I've scanned into the book. Lightly inspired by Paul's Book, I thought about scanning in a post-it note and writing the title in myself. Regardless, I want a relatively minimalistic cover and I don't want to include any of the photos I took on the front cover. I plan on keeping the back cover plain too.

I titled the book 'Beneath the River' as I grew up in a borough of South London. I also feel as though the phrase has a bit of a negative/sad connotation to it which I feel fits in with the theme in my book.

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Items that look like trash scanned using my phone then background deleted through Photoshop

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Post-it note w/ title, cut out using Photoshop

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Title + credit page rewritten using a marker to make it stand out more than the biro

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Marker writing edited onto original post-it, as well as colour changed using Photoshop

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I imagined my photobook looking more like a zine than an actual book, so I made a mockup of one in Photoshop. If I were to print it, I would do so similar to An Attic Full of Trains (https://mackbooks.co.uk/collections/bestsellers/products/an-attic-full-of-trains). I really like that the paper looks slightly textured. However, instead of binding it with string, I'd prefer to do so with staples as I think it looks a bit more edgy which is the overall vibe I'm going for.

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During my final tutorial with Kalina, we talked a bit about my layout choices and a couple of the photos she wasn't feeling.
I removed one of these photos (the full-bleed graffiti image) and altered the layout of others to get my final draft. Initially, I really liked the graffiti photo that I got rid of but upon speaking to Kalina, I understand how it doesn't really match the context of the rest of the photos that are more focused on line and shape. I planned on replacing it at first, but I thought that it could be helpful to place more emphasis on the white space throughout the photobook, whilst simultaneously placing more on the select few full-bleed photos.