Traditionally, the first wedding anniversary gift is paper. Not that this was something I took into consideration or even knew about when my husband and I decided to design and print photo year books for each other. It was something I wanted to do in a long time, but the priorities what to spend money on were always somewhere else. It isn’t easy to justify to spend money on images you have stored somewhere on a hard drive. “It can wait”. “I don’t have time for this”. “It is not essential”.
The process of designing the pages was chaotic, I’m not going to lie. We didn’t use the “masterpieces” of my photographs, no: I collected every photo taken by our two smartphones, by our cameras, sitting on different hard-drives. The criteria of the photos I picked weren’t technical perfection of the photos. I wanted to tell a story: The good, the bad and the ugly. Yes – the ugly. It makes me proud of how my husband and I overcame obstacles together and it makes me humble and grateful to be where I am now.
Designing the pages of a photo book allows me to tell a story that digital folders sitting on a hard-drive just fail to do. Chronologically, spread by spread, page by page, new places and impressions, flicking through the chapters, through our own individual stories: Day by day, month by month, year by year.
It is hard for the human brain to store memories in a chronological order. The older the memory, the harder it gets. The rest is just fog and blur. When our photo books finally arrived in the mail, I was so excited and couldn’t wait and had to look at them straight away. The pieces fell into place and the blur disappeared.
For me, the photo books are such a wonderful way to support the brain and keep the memories alive and in order. Now, there are only two books. I am planning on making at least 60 more.
Design © Bryan
“Zweitausendvierzehn” = “two thousand fourteen”
The little symbols on the spine represent a “theme” for the year. 2013 is a little airplane for all the flying around the world to visit each other. 2014 is a little wedding cake because we got married in 2014.
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