Assignment 3: Artist’s Books - Damian Hickey Photography - Boston Event, Portrait, and Documentary Photographer

Here are my finished images. First is the accordion book, which I am calling The Mirror.

The Mirror: Accordion Book

I made this book using images that I had photographed the Saturday before for doing image transfers. Originally, the pictures were for my Billionaire space race picture, so I had reversed each one, giving me the possibility of facing wach image left or right. I was interested in these photos in themselves though. When I see them I feel they are about the experience of isolation in the pandemic, people looking at their own image in a mirror.

Cover of the book. It measures about 8.125″ square. This is made with vellum over chipboard which has been painted with cyanotype.

Cover with string untied

Detail: the book opened

Portrait and reverse image face each other.

The full book opened

Detail

Museum Sketchbook

This book is made of 10 drawings that I did while I was in art school. Our drawing class took trips to the Museum of Natural History and the Rodin Museum to draw. I just got these sketches back in a portfolio of old artwork from my Mom’s house. They were on loose sheets torn out of a drawing pad, so I thought I would collect them all into a sketchbook. The cover is grey drawing paper with a cloth spine. I thought this cloth scrap was cheerful and went well with the grey. IT took me a long time to decide on materials for this book, because I wanted something more meaningful. But I decided that what was actually meaningful to me was to take these sketches I did so long ago and preserve them in this book where people could find them and see them.

The cover of the book

First page. The binding is visible

Detail, a page in the book

The opened book, left-hand pages are blank. You can also see the paper leaves I made to glue the drawings in.

Spine of the book showing the thread I used to stitch it. IT is the simple 3-hole stitch.

Strip: Artist’s Book

This was the first book I made on the first and second day, because it was the idea I was most excited about. All three of my books are related to my art-research about time, the passage of time and my experience of it. For this one, the idea was to print my body on a strip of cyanotype that would only hold the image of part of it. It would recall test strips and the passage of time on my middle-aged body. I like how it makes landscapes and how the viewer can experiement with viewing different parts. I think of the progression from feet to head as a passage of time. front and back covers are taken from a cyanotype I did when I was 18. I feel like the two 18-year old hands are holding my 48-year old body between them. I am in the young self’s future and he is in my past, but we are the same person so we are in both moments. I am planning to add a text introduction on the first (all blue) page and to make a box with glass front and back to display the book.