Stephanie Scott ART 333: Photo Book Personal Project Mentor May 7, 2013
Throughout this semester, we have examined dozens of different photography books, looking at layout, subject, narrative, etc. The photography book, or photo-bookworks, “utilize photography as a central medium and exist as an artwork in book form” (Schulz). For our final project, in which we were to develop a layout and narrative for our own photo book, we needed to find a published photo book to act as a mentor in our process. For my photo book mentor, I chose The Descendants by Janne Lehtinen. Janne Lehtinen is a Finnish photographer from Karhula, Finland, born in 1970 (Saachi Online). His photo book, The Descendents, is a sort of autobiography, with images and texts describing his hometown, where “people believe that all residents will eventually meet with a sad, usually sinister, and absolutely inevitable fate” (“Janne Lehtinen: The Descendents”). This is the second photo-bookwork that Lentinen has had published. For the most of the book, the photographs are on the right page; sometimes they have a white border between the edges of the image and the page, reminiscent of photo album snapshots; some of these images are indeed photographs from his childhood, in either black and white or sepia, that have been scanned. On other pages the image encompasses the entire sheet. On the left hand page, adjacent to the images, are the memories that Lethinen associates with them. These include memories from his childhood, or events that took place at the settings within the images. Nearly every page has a varying amount of text. On several pages there are