Context
At the begining of the Coronavirus in China, I have took one of the last plane with my family to go back to France. We originally planned to stay a month in France. We arrived at the family’s chalet located in a ski resort called “Le Collet d’Allevard”, in the French North Alps, between Grenoble and Chambéry. We did our two weeks quarantine and at the end of the following week, the confinement started in France.
Once the ski resort suddenly closed, everything was so quiet with a strange atmosphere, but surrounded by amazing landscapes from different mountain ranges. I shoot at first the landscapes, but quickly the ski lifts and the different kind of architecture we can find here, with an original approach. I have created 4 different chapters which are 4 different aspects of this place during an historical and very special period of time.
Text & graphic design
After few weeks of shooting, I needed to wrote something to accompany the photographies. The writting style is poetic, same as the photographies. Once I wrote the text and had photos of ski lift, architecture, landscapes, details, etc, I naturally setup the pages to express in the best way my feeling here. I have first decided the book’s size which is slightly smaller than a A4 but with different proportions: its format is thiner than a A4.
I built a grid to set up vertical and horizontal photos, considering their original proportions. I combined this photo grid -which comes in different ways- with the text’s grid. Result is that the images, texts and font style dialogue harmoniously together.
Physical aspect
It’s so magical to finally see our pictures in screen embodying in a nice paper. It was make sense to me to work with a local printer and I’ve chosen one close to Grenoble who does an amazing work, plus their employees are so kind. Book quantity was enough to justify an offset print technic, which is absolutely amazing regarding the quality. You can keep super fine details and nice gradients. We did different print tests and during the print day, I was on site to control the colours. It was possible to push warm or cold tones for some page areas.
I figured it out this book as physical object. At first the book size is very important: its size (slightly smaller than a A4) is very handy and pleasant to hold in our hands. For the cover, I’ve chosen a 300g paper to make it strong but flexible at the same time. Cover finishes are in soft touch which is very smooth and give a pleasant sensation under our fingers.
There are 80 internal pages in 160g which is quite thick, and in addition to that, 4 postal cards and 2 bookmarks are printed on a 300 g paper. Overall the 84 pages book thickness is one centimeter, which give the feeling oh having something strong in our hands. As the paper is thick, I have chosen the stitched finishes to make the book super strong.
Few photogaphies from the different chapters.
Here an article published in a newspaper the 20th January 2021, about this book project.
Receiving my books, end of July 2020, a day before my first exhibition about this book.
First exhibition, August 2020, at the Collet d’Allevard, in the French North Alps.
