Final Statement - Project 2

a Tourist's Guide to Kansas City's Smaller Attractions

Like any city, Kansas City is full of tourist-oriented things to see and do. In this book, none of those things matter. These pages take a closer look at parts of Kansas City that often go unnoticed, despite their beauty. Shadows, cracks on the ground and weathered wood matched with line studies combine to make this book your own personal guide to the tiny lines of Kansas City. So stop looking where the signs and pamphlets tell you to, and explore your environment with a keen eye to find the linear details of everyday life with this line reference book in hand.

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So, the main focus of my book was on the smaller details of Kansas city, as opposed to a more architectural approach. Buildings are designed with their appearance and structure in mind, while these photographs contain objects that are less planned than that. These are images are unique to Kansas City but could also be universalized and the idea could be applied to any location.

Formally speaking, I chose to arrange my pairs so that they alternated from line study->image to image->line study. I also tried to arrange them in an order that created a sense of flow or movement between the pages, like one long continuous line throughout the whole book. So each half of a photograph is intended to complete the path or pattern into it's counterpart, and also interact with the pair it's touching.



For example, in this pairing I used one of my combined diagonal line studies and continued the pattern into the adjacent photograph. It feels sort of silly to explain something that seems pretty straight forward. Pretty much, I sorted through both my photographs and line studies, looking for similarities in the line structure, rhythm or direction. I personally had the most fun with the curved lines even though I ended up not having very many in my book. Cropping and framing isolated areas of the lines allowed for me to simplify their composition and match them with photographs more easily.


At first it was difficult to find pairs that created a conversation between each other, and I was just trying to match edges up between the two images. This might have worked just for the sake of piecing two things together, but all of those compositions were visually stagnate-they needed more than just to line up. But once I got the hang of it, creating dynamic comparisons through juxtaposition was something that became a really interesting challenge. Each half of a duo added information to the other half, so that 1+1 really added up to more than just 2! :)

The construction of the actual book was a lot more challenging that I expected it to be. Maybe I overestimated my ability to cut straight lines or measure accurately. But just like when selecting the images for the pages, the key to a good finised product was to created an excess at first, and then select only the best (square cut-outs, in this case) for the final artifact.