EYJ-13 PLANETARY POSTCARD BOOK SET

This set of three folding books was inspired by the format of the souvenir “postcard” book, which were little sets or booklets of tiny cards featuring photos of a monument, national park, or landmark. Often the “postcards” weren’t even sendable postcards but instead it was just a set of images to remember a place by, and they would frequently include surprisingly mundane images of a place. I wanted to take this idea and give it a futuristic twist. I created a set of three books, each one exploring a different (fictional) planet in the (fictional) EYJ-13 System. The books are intended to give a peek into life on these distant and largely unvisited planets - serving as a means of vicarious travel in the future. Using an old format to share places from a future when postcards, paper mail, or perhaps even paper itself would surely be obsolete was part of the clash between subject and form that I wanted to play with in this project.

The photos in each book are digital collages using photos I have taken myself over my travels, as well as stock photos. They are processed to give a grainy, aged look to them much like the photos in the original style of these booklets, even though these hypothetical images of the future would be perfectly crisp and clear. The three planets cover very different environments: Nalaris is an icey planet, Hapsis is an ocean planet, and Petrax is a dry desert planet. The cover images of the planets themselves were created by taking photos of the sky through a pair of binoculars. Each book folds back into itself, creating a compact booklet that folds out into a long display of images. Overall, this project was an experiment in bringing together forms of the past with ideas of the future, and an opportunity to play with images I have been taking and collecting for years.