strategic advice - story edit - picture edit

Borealis - trees and people of the Northern Forest by Jeroen Toirkens

Photographer Jeroen Toirkens and I have cooperated for almost ten years. I edited his previous two books, Nomad and Solitude and he approached me again for his new project Borealis, 5 years ago. In this project he would make eight journeys during four years with writer Jelle Brandt Corstius to the boreal, or Northern forests.  

Jeroen was facing several challenges when he started this project. He wanted to make a book and an exhibition, but also to engage his audience: the people who had bought his previous books. The challenge was how to create eight stories without overlap as part of a larger narrative, and how to build an audience around the project. 

Jeroen designed a unique subscription model that allowed the audience to join the writer and the photographer on their journeys. To make sure the eight stories would not turn out to be repetitive, I helped him first define the overall story of Borealis: what is the role of the forest for all those working, living, and using the forest? Each trip then had to focus on one particular aspect of the forest. One story would be about living in the forest, one about saving the forest, one about the cover a forest can give, another about how the forest is threatened: eight different aspects told in eight different stories: together telling one story about the importance of the forest. 

Before each trip Jeroen and I discussed the story he would be following and what his visual strategy would be. Upon his return we would look at his work, refine his premise and create the edit that he could present to the newspaper that supported his project and published each individual story. 

When Jeroen and Jelle had finished their eight trips we had to bring all the stories together into one overall narrative that could be edited into a book publication and curated into a museum exhibition. I helped Jeroen confirm the premise for both projects: the immaterial value of the forest. We jointly edited the photographic sequences for both the book and the exhibition, following this premise. During several editing sessions in my studio we first created the sequence of the images for the book, which was then handed to the designer. In close cooperation with the exhibition designer we then identified the images that would tell the same story in an exhibition format.

The resulting book is beautifully designed by Wout de Vringer, and published by Lannoo Publishers in Dutch and English. The exhibition opened in January 2021 at the Photomuseum in The Hague, and is on show until 3 October before it travels to the Anchorage Museum in Alaska in November 2021.

Borealis project website and webshop http://borealisproject.nl/home-eng