A Photo Book

Chosen Fibers is a 26-page photo book of my own creation.

It displays a series of 26 square photo groups, each one split into four quadrants of fiber texture:  a single person’s hair and three things that the person is wearing.

Chosen Fiber’s text is heavily influenced by Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore’s book The Medium Is the Massage.  Though they address new and unfamiliar media in their writing, they do so with somewhat of a neutral tone, leaving the reader to approach with either pessimism or optimism, or some other point of view.

Chosen Fibers showcases my optimism toward the Internet, and accepts the Internet-using community’s actions in customizing their online personalities as entirely nothing new.

The following is the complete text of Chosen Fibers.

We’ve always been doing this.  We reach into our collection of fibers and patterns and choose what we look like every day.  So don’t be afraid of the Internet.  There’s no turning back.  We are who we are.  So don’t be afraid to let it show.  Wear new media like you wear your socks.  The pixel is your new friend.  Optimism is all you need.

The text is playfully juxtaposed with nearly full-page images for the majority of the book.  After the punch line “of the Internet,” there is a four-page pause of full spreads intended to focus the reader on what has just been said:  an interlude.  For a few more familiar pages, the original formatting resumes, but pauses again to allow an image to move from a central, isolated point of view on the left to a full-page spread on the right.  This foreshadows the next statement, that “the pixel is your new friend.”  Four images, then, spread left to right, act like a group of pixels organized onscreen.  The final message hits with large images once again:  “Optimism is all you need.”