Last month I had the pleasure of participating in a photo book workshop with dutch designers Teun van der Heijden and Sandra van der Doelen (of Heijdens Karwai) in Jakarta Indonesia. Internationally recognized, Teun and Sandra have collaborated in designing numerous award-winning photo books, including Black Passport by Stanley Greene, War Sand by Donald Weber and Diamond Matters by Kadir van Lohuizen. The duo has also been teaching photo book workshops all over the world.
Over the course of a week we explored the photobook medium; from paper selection to photo sequencing, design and final production. I came to Teun with hundreds of images from my Voices in the Wilderness series with a rough edit and narrative in mind. Teun is not just a designer, but a master editor focused on visual language, which became very beneficial in the book making process. He brought a new language to the project with his own perspective and input on the edit and sequence. This process was very much a collaboration and not just one of us dictating the structure.
It was a highly intensive and very productive week. Seeing the work evolve and transform into a polished book dummy was extremely rewarding. See the video below for the final product.