It was a friday evening, late’ish, not the time of day you expect a call to offer you an assignment in Romania, to go see my old pals the roma. But that’s what happened few months back, but anyway, fast forward a meeting, many contradictory emails and the assignment never happened. But the magazine, Transit Magazine in Japan, did wish to buy some of my photographs of roma to use in an Eastern Europe special they were producing. All fine and well.

So I meet the editor, he asks me to prepare a short selection of images for him to choose from, a set which would tell the history of the camp where I shot, tell the rags to riches story, and of the changes that had taken place. Great. And the editor tells me he’d email me layouts to check and approve. Really great- how often does that ever happen ? ( Eh, grand total of twice previously in my career as far as I can remember, – Leica Tsushin Magazine, and The Fader magazine).

So, in a five part series I’ll show you how the layouts evolved from initial ideas through to finished on the shelf spread. Out now in a book shop near you, unless you live in the Shetland Isles in which case you may wish to visit Amazon.co.jp to buy it here: Buy the issue of the magazine here.

Firstly, the editor emailed me three different layouts. He wanted my opinion on picture choice, sequencing and any impressions I had. The three layouts all had different feels, and the below were the only ones set against black pages. Out of the three spreads I was first shown, (other two to follow over coming days), this was the initial spread I liked, I’ll call it Option 1.

I loved the title being big and bold, and even the choice of words I was happy with although I was later told if I had an alternate title I could suggest it. I loved the black pages. I was happy enough with the actual layout of the images on the pages.

The points about this spread that I didn’t like so much were: (1) on the opening spread the two opposing images were different heights, I asked that they be made the same height. (2)The girl standing in front of an Alpine landscape wallpaper on spread 3, was too similar, and therefor repetitive in the narrative, to the image of the man standing against tree wallpaper on the opening spread. I suggested we remove the girl image and replace it with a different image of a different girl.

So with those comments and changes proposed, I said this was my favoured spread and I’d be happy with the black pages. Tomorrow, and day after, I’ll post here the other two initial spreads and my comments on them.

-Funnily the only other time I can think of when my images were used on black pages was when the same work, my Romanian roma photographs, appeared in The Fader magazine, issue 46. See the spread here on an earlier blog post.