Portraits of People on the Move- The Book

One of the main parts of the Portraits of People on the Move exhibit is a book telling over 50 different immigrants' stories told from their own perspectives. Jennifer has been meeting with people for the last few months to interview them and hear all about their experiences. My task was then to gather these stories and arrange them into an 85+ page book format including their picture, which Jennifer would often take after the interview or they would later send.

Jennifer wasn’t sure what program would be best for me to use and left the option up to me. Up until this point I had pretty much zero experience with InDesign but I knew it would be the best way to go about completing this book. I immediately got to work watching tutorials and learning the shortcuts. Thankfully, the program was incredibly quick and easy to learn. I now feel really confident in it and would be happy to explore it again with other projects.

Since my return from Ireland, Jennifer and I have been meeting in her studio a few times a week to compare notes on how things are going (also through many emails) but a lot of the book I was able to work on in my apartment. Speaking of Jennifer’s studio, I have to bring up how beautiful it is! It’s on the very top floor of her building with really high ceilings and hardwood floors. Two of the walls are filled with really big windows that are surrounded by smaller squares of cut glass. She also has her awesome artwork around along with plants and cute sofas and things. It has been an extremely welcoming space with a very productive atmosphere.

It is hard to say how long the entire book creation took since we’ve been working on all parts of the project at the same time, but it was certainly the largest task. A lot went on each page, like photo credits, names and locations. The first few times we met up I spent the day emailing the 50 people who were interviewed to gather this info, which really upped my email writing speed. We also had a few versions of each story because we were constantly editing (up until the minute it was sent to print). I really enjoyed putting this book together and reading all of the incredible stories. It's extremely exciting to finally have it at the printer.

Here are some of my favorite portraits with an example from the book. The rest of the stories can be read here on the project's blog: http://supperdance.com/supper-blog/