AD5803 - Book's text development

On Friday I showed my book to the class in order to receive some feedback. My biggest concern is the amount of text in the book since I feel like if I cut off any further pieces of the interviews, I am cutting off important details of the stories of my subjects. People had different opinions about the amount of text in my book, some said that the design works very well and the images are not overwhelmed by the written parts, other said that in some parts is way too much, and finally others said that they should read it to judge.

I strongly believe that the last one is the wisest opinion.

I have read each interview several time during all the process of making of this project. Waiting some time before coming back to read an old interview is very helpful in order to be more objective and less emotionally attached, and that's what I did all the time.

The biggest question to answer in order to find the solution of my dilemma is:

WHO IS THE AUDIENCE OF MY BOOK?

To me, my book is directed to normal people, not necessarily interested and expert in photography. Mine, is a collection of stories about migration and I would like the mainstream audience to read it.

The theme of migration affects everybody, so I really think it is a common interested and my book should be accessible to a wide range of people. Obviously, I think that Italians and British are likely to be the most interested about my book since they are more directly involved in the stories of my subjects. Also for this reason, I decided to do two versions of the book, one English and one Italian.

In a very first stage, I considered the option to have the text translated in both languages in the same book, but I soon realised that it would have been absolutely overwhelming unless I wanted to use just quotes from the interviews.

Some people also suggested me to have the audio with the interviews in Italian while the text in English. I didn't really like this option since I want people to be focused on what they are reading and furthermore it would not be possible since the technical quality of my audio would not be suitable; in fact, I have always recorded thinking that I only needed the information.

Yesterday, I decided to ask my mum to read the book, and until now, she has been the only one who has read it. Apart from the fact that she is my mum, she would be the perfect kind of audience of my book. An Italian citizen who has a relative living in the UK and consequently is very close to the theme of migration.

She really enjoyed reading the stories and she found them very interesting. Obviously, this is a very impartial opinion, but at the moment she is the only one who read the whole book.

Every subject has a very different story from the others. At the very beginning of this project, my aim was exactly the opposite. I wanted to focus on the conditions of the Italians living in London who have all very similar experiences and background. I wanted to focus on this aspect of repetition and stereotypes; when I wrote the first time the introduction on my book, it looked very different from the actual ones. Developing the project, I realised that I wanted to have more variety and I wanted to take the case of the Italians as a means to reflect on migration on a broader level. For this reason, the people in my book are not only "strictly" Italians, because I did not want anymore to select a category, but instead finding parallelisms between different situations.

This is the first draft of the book's introduction:

This is the latest draft of the introduction:

I like to see how my plans have changed and acquired depth. The first premise of the project was describing a contemporary phenomenon in a very narrow and "fairy-tale" way; the final version of the same project is introducing a much deeper reflection on the same issue but with a broader and more inquisitive approach. By taking more distance from a specific fact, I explored deeper a much bigger phenomenon.

Coming back to my concern about the amount of text in my book, I think that if I would developed this project following my first premise and, consequently, ended up with a collection of very similar stories; I would have had to cut-off much more and keeping just quotes, otherwise it would have been very boring.

With my new approach, I made sure to include people with much more different stories and each one touches further topics in the debate of migration. Therefore, I think that I need to keep the written part rich.

For this reason, I played a lot with the design and I used different images crops and layout, including a good amount of negative space. I had to create a fast, alternated visual rhythm in order to compensate with the text reading demand.