Place- encounter - time project

After learning how to adjust the size of pictures on contact sheets in Photoshop - and a little troubleshooting with the printer - I printed many sheets of my "underground" photos. Getting them to print in the right sequence was a bit of a puzzle - turns out that they print as 1, 101, 118, 124, 2, 20, 21, 22 .... etc - so I renumbered (automatically, using Batch Rename in Bridge) using three digits - 001,002,003, etc. Phew! Pix of the sides of tunnels look much the same - and I wanted to keep the right photos in the right section of tunnel, even if some had been edited out.

Then they merely needed to be cut up and assembled.

The finished book, in its black wrapper - "Holborn to Finsbury Park" - consists of strips of photos joined end on end and folded into an accordion book. There are 80 photos, out of a "journey" of about 120. I've added the Walter Benjamin quote (as on the prototype) on the back, as part of a long red line that stops when the "tunnel wall" becomes a void, then resumes for the rest of the journey. It references the red thread of destiny. The quote has a rather sinister sting in the tale - flash of memory, moment of danger - and it's written on the back of the photos taken in the section going from Kings Cross to Russell Square, where the 7 July 2005 bombing took place. I haven't added any other reference to that event ... perhaps there needs to be some clarification?

I agonised over titles and eventually realised that the straightforward description might be "enough". A working title for the series (or is it a collection) is "Trains That" ... a truncated title reminiscent of "Thought For The" - the series of little books produced for the flower project (structure project).

The black strips standing on the cutting mat are to be joined and the photos cut out (carefully in sequence) and pasted onto the right-hand pages - one journey on the front of the page and another on the back - to and from Finsbury park station, both with the appearance of a train on the other line. (Magic moment!) Words are to go on the left hand page; not quite sure what those words will be. Dusty dirty tunnels don't exactly inspire poetry (or do they?). The quote from Anaxagoras has got to be in there somewhere: Appearances are glimpses of the unseen. Which is exactly what the appearance of "the other train" is. ("The other train" - that could be a title... it will depend on the rest of the text.) If all goes well, the train will appear in both "tunnels" at the same point in the book - ie, on both sides of the same pages.

After all the befuddlement with the first contact sheets not printing photos in order, I was careful to number the strips of photos (on the bit that would be covered by glue). Also, I was careful to check the sequence before actually gluing - and managed to avert a minor disaster that way.

My other fear was that the folding would go wrong - that I would fold the middle of a photo, rather than in between. To my despair, that did happen - twice in a row, what's more!