Hotdog books

I made these hotdog books as ideas for my original location and research but didn't blog about them at the time. It is interesting to look back at them now having moved my research to a completely different theme. Meanwood Towers is building with an interesting history and survives today as flats, I tried to look at the location from different perspectives and compare them. For my first hotdog book I researched the original owner of the building that and compared him to a friend that now lives on the top floor and has lived there the longest out of all the current tenants. I wanted to discover the similarities between the two people and try to illustrate direct comparisons between them even though they are from different times. The original owner commissioned an organ to be constructed inside the building and was clearly very enthusiastic about music. My friend sam had a recording studio constructed in his flat and although not on anywhere near as grand a scale he has kept the musical nature of the building alive. The original owner was an engineer and inventor who apparently spent many days working on small prototypes in the house. Sam spends a lot of his time working on bonsai trees and although these two activities are not closely related the 2 mens relationship with them seems to be. Both seem to enjoy the act of working on and creating something, a process that can be very therapeutic.

The second story I tried to tell is one that Sam told me about trying to warm his flat up in winter. With the house being very old and having no central heating the building is very hard to heat up and Sam has fixed up an old log burner to heat his flat. This is a cheap way to heat the house but is hard work compared to simply hitting a switch. I tried to show communicate the feeling of getting home on a cold rainy night and having to go through the processes of chopping wood and carrying up to the top floor. I wanted to show the work involved and the sense of satisfaction when you are finally sat in a cosy warm flat. I tried to use colour to show the temperature and create feeling of hot and cold.

For the third book a looked more at the bonsai trees that make parts of Sam's flat look like a miniature forest. The trees are shaped and manipulated with wires throughout their liver to take on the shapes of their larger relatives. Lots of work goes into making these beautiful plants play with ideas of scale and appearance. This idea has less of a narrative than the other two but has a lot of opportunity to create a beautiful well crafted book. I think sometimes I should move away from a conventional narrative and experiment with subtle images that create a feel for a place or subject without a tangible story.