concept - story edit - picture edit

Blood and Honey - Nicole Segers and Irene van der Linde

Writer Irene van der Linde and photographer Nicole Segers have been cooperating for some twenty years. Their main project deals with the influence of the new European borders on the lives of people. For the last part of their trilogy in their “European Encounters’ series they travelled along the borders of former Yugoslavia, in the wake of Rebecca West and her 1937 magnus opus Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

Irene and Nicole approached me after I had done the picture edit for the previous book, The Ferry of Istanbul, encounters along the Bosporus to discuss a new cooperation. Their challenge was how to combine a 90,000 word nonfictional documentary text with a photographic documentary work. They had an ambitious plan: they wanted to tell one story with images and text, to combine them like the Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama had done in his book Dazai (2014). The photographs were not illustration to the words, nor a separate visual essay sort of section as part of the book. 

My solution was to approach both text and images as supplementary elements to the same narration, each with its own function within that narration. It meant that the text would describe the historical context of their journey and the actual encounters with the people they meet. The photography on the other hand would narrate how that history is still present within the current landscape through the format of a photographic roundtrip. 

To achieve this merge between text and photography, I read the full manuscript by the writer and saw the rough edits by the photographer. With this background I was able to define with both authors the premise of their story: the focal point of what the story was about, and why it was relevant. With the premise defined we then took a bold step and came together for four full days to assemble the first manuscript combining text and images. 

In a small house in the countryside, Irene read aloud her manuscript, and we identified what parts of her narration were crucial, what elements could be taken over by the photography, and what parts were not essential and could be deleted. Those parts that could be covered visually, I edited, together with the photographer, into various photographic narrations. 

 With this combined manuscript, Nicole and Irene went to Smel *creative agency who took the idea a step further and translated it in a refined and beautiful design. A classic book with variations in font size, few variations in image size, and a consistent flow between text and images.

This cooperation between myself, the authors, the designers resulted in an amazing publication that received the honor of being named on the 10 best Dutch photobooks by daily de Volkskrant: “exceeds all expectations”. Another daily, NRC Handelsblad gave it a 5 out of 5 review here. According to NRC “Everybody should read this book…”

I discuss the narration of each book in the Encounters trilogy in episode 14 of the webinar series Visual Stories in Photobooks: https://www.forhanna.com/project/visual-stories/

Bloed en Honing was awarded the first prize at the 2021 edition of the Dutch Photo book Awards in the category ‘Image and Text’. According to the jury: “Blood & Honey stood out from the start because of the extreme care with which this book was designed. Both the words and the images force the reader into the story. Text and image complement each other beautifully and do justice to both narrative forms.”
https://fotofestivalnaarden.nl/nl/nieuws/fotoboekenprijs

The projectpage by the authors and to order the book: https://bloedenhoning.nl