More work towards the book with Linda. We’ve been discussing the
merits of these photos of the stamps themselves. Linda likes them very
much and wants to use them in an adapted form in the book itself,
instead of the prints therefrom. I’m coming round to this a bit. I
think in the sense that I wanted to make some sort of facsimile of
woodcut that there would have to be a greater number of pages for the
idea to really take hold. Thinking of a viewer, there’s probably more
immediate interest in the image above than her would be from the print
taken from it. Although the ‘puritan’ idea of the facsimile woodcut-
book is defeated by the use of a photographic image like the above, I
wonder if I am cherishing an idea – in the facsimile book – that
merely limits the visual interest to what I can achieve through the
prints. The above is arguably more arresting to the modern eye and
will nevertheless reference its influences in the woodcut tradition.
It’ll also disagree with the (similarly digital) text that we are
setting for the book in a fake-antique typeface.
I will need to see how it looks in the actual book setup to see what
actually happens. There’s basically a decision between a more
arresting and interesting image (I think), and a purer idea that maybe
carries the postmodern jokes in the drawings and writing a bit more
cleanly.