Glasgow’s Spring Photo Book
UPDATE - Glasgow’s Spring was successfully funded, and is now in production! You can preorder a copy on my webstore HERE.
The next chapter in my portrait of the city is now live! Click on the video above to hear a bit about it, then hit the wee K symbol or click here to head straight to the Kickstarter page.
I’ve already written a bit about this year-long street photography project here, and my process for shooting it. But today, exactly twelve months after I started, and on the day I took the last photo on the last roll of film, I thought I’d write a bit about how and why I choose and arrange the images which make it into print.
If you’ve picked up a copy of Glasgow’s Winter or Glasgow’s Autumn, you’ll notice that the former has a very red colour palette while the latter is very blue. It will come as no surprise then that Spring is filled with green hues! These are the colours I associate with each season, and they also form the RGB primary colours which make up every other colour our world is saturated with. (Can you guess what the colour scheme of Glasgow’s Summer will be?)
Part of curating the images for each book is making sure these colours dominate, while also leaving room for all the other stories I want to include. Autumn was all about finding beauty in imperfection and endings; for Winter that beauty was found in the emptiness and isolation. For Spring, things come back to life, and are a bit more surreal and magical, mirroring Autumn with new beginnings and nature taking over the city. There’s also lots of subtle symbols of femininity and motherhood, (again mirroring the subtle masculine symbols found in Autumn). When Summer is completed, it will mirror Winter too.
I left a gap of six months between releasing Autumn and Winter, partly as I was more busy working with clients, but also because it means I was able to shoot the Spring photos (and even some Summer photos) while designing the Winter book - this means I have been able to make sure there are common threads and visual cues linking all four books - I’m calling these easter eggs, and I’m hoping they tie everything together, giving the feel of the city constantly shifting and changing as it does throughout the year.
So while each book tells its own story, with its own look and feel, they’re each part of the whole, and all four editions make up one big portrait of the city, and the wheel of the year turning around it.
No, I had no idea this is what it would turn into when I picked up this cute little camera twelve months ago and started photographing Autumn! As with most projects I take on, it quickly grew arms and legs, and like the city, developed a mind of it’s own.
This is due in no small part to the wonderful community that has grown around the project on Kickstarter. Their support from day one gave me the confidence to expand the project, and calls for a Winter edition confirmed I had to keep going. So because of that, each season has had it’s own Kickstarter campaign, to keep this community involved, and reward them for their support.
So if you haven’t already, please head along to the Kickstarter page and check it out. Thank you so much to all of you who have already backed it, and shared it with your friends - you’re legends!
