To Be Understandable
PHOTOGRAPHY, BOOK DESIGN
During my 2025 winter term, I had the opportunity to participate in a week-long workshop with renowned designer and photographer Martin Venezky. In groups of three, we were given the prompt to create a photobook about our experience creating the photobook. Over the week, I was heavily inspired by Martin’s abstract and emotional work as well as my classmates’ artistry.
During this workshop, I worked with two of my peers, Evan Whitaker (evanwhitaker.com) and Maria Dierkes (Dierkesdesigns.com), to create this book titled “To Be Understandable.” We wanted to explore meaning and how we can change meaning purely through proximity. Quite a pretentious idea that we had fun leaning into. Please enjoy and don’t forget to ask yourself: “What does this mean?”
Design Process
The process of this book was, of course, the most important element of content, so we allowed ourselves time to explore. What started as a discussion of what the focus of our book should be, over experimental collaging, turned into a scavenger hunt for random objects around our building, and then into a randomized pairing of objects and simultaneous photoshoots. We wanted to play into the idea of how an object’s symbolic meaning can change when put in proximity with a random array of objects. Halftoned pixels became secondary imagery to the clear-cut images and were interrelated with this idea of the abstraction of proximity and meaning.
