It's called The Complete Encyclopaedia of Humanity and it's very ironic yet serious and modern yet vintage. Here are some photos of it:
This book took me a long time to finish (and I may or may not have turned it in late...) because there was so much writing I had to incorporate. I went through several drafts of writing types before I finally found the one I wanted to do, if only because I was running out of time.
Like I said in an earlier blog post, these photographs are from books I find at thrift stores that I like to hoard for no particular reason. I spend time categorizing these photos into relevant topics and themes, and I keep it all to myself—I haven't shown or shared these photos until now. While looking through my photos, I realized that I was drawn to photographs that specifically featured people; I didn't have a lot of landscapes or flowers or urban environments. I was interested in exploring the personal environment of strangers that I would never meet and never know, and I wanted to push that even further in this book, especially in terms of universally-experienced psychological thoughts and behaviors. So I ended up writing little stories for each photograph, fashioning it like an absurdist encyclopedia. I began the book with an entry on "anxiety," because I wanted an "a" word and because it set the tone for the rest of the book. I also included an entry on "breath," because I love Virginia Woolf and there was a particular sentence in her first chapter in The Waves that I wanted to include, also for setting the mood.
Here's one of my favorite entries:
snow—A morning of mist and an afternoon of snow, alive and breathing in the face of industrialism, and my feet and nose are cold and wet, and I can see the top of my eyelashes turning white while the ground around me turns grey, a pallid grey, and I’m overcome with sensation and beauty and dread and bewonderment, and I am at once trying to walk home while trying stop and admire the flurries, though I know tomorrow will bring news reports of accidents and wintry poverty, yet I don’t care, for it’s not happening to me, and right now I cannot think of anything but how the world is conquering me, how the snow overpowers human construction, how I long to be consumed.
Anyway. This was a fun project. I also made a website for it.
This book took me a long time to finish (and I may or may not have turned it in late...) because there was so much writing I had to incorporate. I went through several drafts of writing types before I finally found the one I wanted to do, if only because I was running out of time.
Like I said in an earlier blog post, these photographs are from books I find at thrift stores that I like to hoard for no particular reason. I spend time categorizing these photos into relevant topics and themes, and I keep it all to myself—I haven't shown or shared these photos until now. While looking through my photos, I realized that I was drawn to photographs that specifically featured people; I didn't have a lot of landscapes or flowers or urban environments. I was interested in exploring the personal environment of strangers that I would never meet and never know, and I wanted to push that even further in this book, especially in terms of universally-experienced psychological thoughts and behaviors. So I ended up writing little stories for each photograph, fashioning it like an absurdist encyclopedia. I began the book with an entry on "anxiety," because I wanted an "a" word and because it set the tone for the rest of the book. I also included an entry on "breath," because I love Virginia Woolf and there was a particular sentence in her first chapter in The Waves that I wanted to include, also for setting the mood.
Here's one of my favorite entries:
snow—A morning of mist and an afternoon of snow, alive and breathing in the face of industrialism, and my feet and nose are cold and wet, and I can see the top of my eyelashes turning white while the ground around me turns grey, a pallid grey, and I’m overcome with sensation and beauty and dread and bewonderment, and I am at once trying to walk home while trying stop and admire the flurries, though I know tomorrow will bring news reports of accidents and wintry poverty, yet I don’t care, for it’s not happening to me, and right now I cannot think of anything but how the world is conquering me, how the snow overpowers human construction, how I long to be consumed.
I know "bewonderment" isn't actually a word but I don't care. I ended up writing a lot about humanity and its powerlessness in the face of nature. I think I was influenced by Al Jarnow, who I gave a presentation on just two weeks before I started making this book.
Anyway. This was a fun project. I also made a website for it.
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