Time: 10-11 am Location: Biografen, Landskrona Foto, Tyghuset
Abstract The first thing one dos when one looks at a photograph is try to understand what it means. One immediately starts looking for clues. This might be connected to how people learn to read. Each letter in a semiotic alphabet has a specific meaning. Although letters have been derived from a logographic origin, over time they have lost their original connotation. Letters became parts of a code. In order to be fluent in the usage of the code it is important to understand the meaning of its parts. As a photobook designer and visual storyteller, the author of this article has always felt limited by this tendency of looking for meaning—an activity that distracts from quietly looking at a photograph and enjoying its mood, lighting, texture, or color. This essay explores the author’s process of editing photographs into photobooks through the lens of neuroscience and the concept of simple cells. It provides several case studies, with a focus on Poulomi Basu’s Centralia.
Keywords photobook, visual language, visual literacy, editing process
BIO
Teun van der Heijden is a graphic designer and co-founder of Heijdens Karwei, a graphic design agency based in Amsterdam and New York. They are known for the design of award-winning photography books. Well-known titles from their work: Black Passport and Western Front , Rape of a Nation , Interrogations and War Sand , War Porn , Carpe Fucking Diem , REX , An Autobiography of Miss Wish , The Migrant , 1078 Blue Skies , The Poverty Line , Goldcoast and The Quickening , Centralia , She Never Rode that Trishaw Again , SAKASA and recently Hard Times are Fighting Times .
Together with his partner Sandra van der Doelen he is teaching photo book workshops all over the world.
Teun has studied graphic design at St. Joost in Breda. A post academic studies in
Art-Direction at the HKU in Utrecht and Photography at ACF in Amsterdam.
Next to running Heijdens Karwei Teun is professor Visual Design and Hybrid media at the LUCA School of Arts in Genk, Belgium and a faculty member of ICP, the International Center of Photography in New York and teacher at the MAPS program at the KABK in The Hague.
Teun is author of ‘Of Simple Cells and Visual Associations in Photobook Editing’ an article that is featured in the international open-access peer-reviewed journal Trans Asia Photography Vol. 14, published by Duke University Press.