Of Simple Cells and Visual Associations in Photobook Editing

Abstract

The first thing one does when one looks at a photograph is try to understand what it means. One immediately starts looking for clues. This might be connected to how people learn to read. Each letter in a semiotic alphabet has a specific meaning. Although letters have been derived from a logographic origin, over time they have lost their original connotation. Letters became parts of a code. In order to be fluent in the usage of the code it is important to understand the meaning of its parts. As a photobook designer and visual storyteller, the author of this article has always felt limited by this tendency of looking for meaning—an activity that distracts from quietly looking at a photograph and enjoying its mood, lighting, texture, or color. This essay explores the author's process of editing photographs into photobooks through the lens of neuroscience and the concept of simple cells. It provides several case studies, with a focus on Poulomi Basu's Centralia.

About twenty years ago, my partner Sandra van der Doelen and I chose to specialize as photobook designers. We love paper, the three-dimensional possibilities that the book has to offer, the slight tingling that occurs in your fingertips when you experience the touch of the special texture of the cover paper, the smell of ink when you open the book, the rustling of the pages while flipping through them.

In the past, our assignments mainly came through photobook publishers. Photographers preferred a particular publisher rather than a specific designer. It was via the publishers that we were matched with photographers who wanted to make a book. The core of telling a visual story in the form of a photobook lies in the photographic edit. Whenever I use the term edit in this article, I refer to the editorial process of arranging photographs that accompany an article in a publication or that exist on their own and imply a narrative or outline of a creative concept, like a visual story in a photobook. I do not mean the manipulation or changing of images but rather the combined activity of selecting and sequencing. The editing process is done by observing a large number of photos, making a selection that is suitable for the book, and making a sequence with this selection. Often an editorial team consists of the photographer, a curator or editor—which in the book realm is a role generally filled by the publisher—and the designer. I never felt comfortable being part of a larger editorial team because it leads to too many compromises. When I started to work as a photobook designer, I was luckily given enough editing freedom by publishers to work one-on-one with photographers. The photographer decided which photos were brought to the editing table. The split in the editing process between the input of the photographer and that of the designer was roughly fifty-fifty. Photographers were open to my opinion, but more open toward it in the sequencing process than the selection process.

The nature of publishing changed shortly after I entered the world of photobooks in the early 2000s. The Internet created a free flow of information. Knowledge became widely accessible outside of books and paper publications. It became increasingly more difficult for publishers to rely on the self-fulfilling predictions that were based on their earlier publishing experiences. The public became more fickle. Local bookshops disappeared, publishers went bankrupt, and the ones who remained couldn't take the financial risk anymore and stopped financing the photobooks they published.

Another effect of the Internet was the emergence of DIY, the do-it-yourself movement. Photographers who were able to arrange their own financing, often through crowdfunding, another novelty of the world wide web, suddenly turned directly to designers. The climate in the Netherlands was ideal for this. Despite being a tiny country, it has many art schools. At these schools, students were encouraged to collaborate across disciplines. At the Royal Academy in the Hague, photography students who decided to make a photobook of their graduation work often collaborated with fellow graphic design students or professional designers. Photographers and graphic designers found each other. That's also how we started to work directly for photographers. In the current climate, a photographer now chooses us directly, a choice based on earlier books we designed. This trust leads to a more intimate alliance. The process of photographic editing originated in the offices of newspapers and illustrated magazines and I also learned my early editing skills in that realm. Nevertheless, as a designer working one-on-one with photographers, I gradually started to edit in a different way (fig. 1). Due to fast-changing techniques in the graphic and photographic realm and wider access to visual information such as vernacular and visual archives, the stories I have been able to work on became more and more complex. This has led my working on books such as Black Passport by Stanley Greene (2009), Interrogations (2011) and War Sand (2017) by Donald Weber, Belgian Autumn by Jan Rosseel (2015), Carpe Fucking Diem by Elina Brotherus (2015), The Migrant by Anaïs López (2018), The Quickening by Ying Ang (2021), Centralia by Poulomi Basu (2020), 1078 Blue Skies, 4432 Days by Anton Kusters (2021), One Day We'll Understand by Sim Chi Yin (2021), and recently, Hard Times Are Fighting Times by Alice Proujansky (2023). The editing of these stories has led to a broader way of looking, analyzing, and editing, a personal philosophy that I want to share in this article.

Gut Feelings Occur in the Brain

In 2015, Sandra and I were invited by Yumi Goto of Reminders Photography Stronghold to teach a masterclass in their gallery in Tokyo (fig. 2). This turned out to become an annual event. In addition to these Tokyo workshops, we have taught workshops at Chobi Mela International Photography Festival in Dhaka, Obscura Festival of Photography in George Town, and at the Jakarta International Photo Festival (JIPFest). The purpose of such a workshop or masterclass is for a group of up to twelve students to go through the entire process of making a photobook over a five- or six-day period, from the start of the edit to the physical dummy. One important part of such a masterclass is how to start a story. The workshops generally take place in a large, open space where, out of several large tables, a “work island” is created. We ask the students in advance to bring a large number of printed photographs. We refer to this initial editing process as making A, B, and C selections: A for your best-of-the-best photographs, B for those you're not sure about, and C for the photographs you don't find particularly interesting. One of the students is asked to lay out this wide selection of photos (or other visual elements) on the large work island in the middle of the editing room. While the teachers, assistants, and students study the photographs, the student whose work is on the table talks about his or her fascination for the subject.

During such a session, an active reflection takes place on both the photographs and the underlying verbal explanation of the photographer's fascination. The students often recognize something in the displayed story that is linked to their own photo series or see a connection with a personal or family experience. They often connect it with a known story from the history of photography or film or with a documentary that links with the work that is being discussed. In short, a kaleidoscopic discussion takes place in which observations, loose thoughts, and concrete ideas are exchanged.

At such a moment, when my senses are fully stimulated by everything I hear and see, I try to partly shut myself off from this discussion. I can still hear the noise but try to place it in the background, as if I have turned down the volume. I try to look at the photos on the table as open-mindedly as possible. They are all equal to me at that moment. I try not to be distracted by the things I recognize or things that I have a preconceived judgment about, in an attempt to be as open for hidden clues and meaning as possible. In all my hesitation, little by little I start to collect a small number of photos and bring them to the empty table next to the work island that is installed for the editing process. I look for basic elements, a mood that might be defined by light or dark, texture or color, a composition defined by horizontal or vertical lines or by shapes I recognize. If there is a person in the photograph, I look for a specific body posture or facial expression. I place a bundle of six or seven photos on the empty table, look at them intently and walk back to where the rest of the photos are displayed to find another bundle. After I have collected about ten to fifteen photos, the process of moving them around starts. Which picture comes first? Which one follows? Again, I focus on basic components: Can I continue these horizontal lines throughout multiple photographs? Do I continue a particular color mood or go for a hard break by placing a photograph with a complementary color next to an earlier one? Before you know it, a story starts to emerge. I call this process “forming the skeleton,” as I'm on the search for the core elements of a story. It may be that in a later moment I decide that this will not be the beginning of the story at all, or that some other photographs will be added or inserted. Key is that this selection of photos represents the soul of the story. In the masterclass, slowly the noise dies down and the students crowd around the table and see that something is happening. “The master is cooking,” says Yumi. Often there is something magical about this moment. Most of the people who have gathered recognize the beginning of a story in that early sequence.

If we talk about an artistic process, we often use words like magical, fascinating, and enchanting, or say “I feel deeply” or “This really moves me,” words that express a feeling. In the 2000 VPRO series Van de schoonheid en de troost (Of Beauty and Consolation), interviewer Wim Kayzer asked the Dutch painter Karel Appel where his inspiration comes from, and Appel answered that the act of painting is more of an “earthy thing.”¹ What I understand from these words is that, while painting, he has little awareness of what he's doing, that his hands and arms are moving more naturally, like branches of a tree in the wind. However beautiful and poetic these expressions are, they are subjective and therefore problematic. What we experience as “magic” is nothing other than the outcome of specific brain cells firing. In neuroscience, the soul does not exist. Our consciousness is the serendipitous outcome of a complex interplay of a network of stations in our brain.

Back to my cooking session in the workshop. My process generally takes ten to fifteen minutes and is done completely in silence. The students want value for money. Raising a hand in the air, one asks, “Teun, can you explain to me your motivation for choosing exactly those photographs and for creating that particular sequence?” I feel ripped from my state of concentration as I am drawn back into the group with my senses awakened just in time to understand the question. I don't have the answer. “It's a gut feeling,” I stammer in reply, while simultaneously realizing that whatever is happening in my gut has no connection with the photo sequence on the table.

I do realize that this is one of the most relevant questions you can ask in my professional field, but the answer is not easy. Many editors would argue that the biggest part of any answer is purely subjective, likewise referring to a gut feeling or saying, “That's just how I do it.” Yet from that moment on, I started to wonder how exactly it works, this process of looking at photographs. I questioned which incentives are responsible for the choices we make and the order in which we place the photographs. That this is determined by subjectivity seems obvious to me, but wouldn't a part of it be a general process, a sequence of steps that you go through time and time again? I examine this process below, but first, I will focus on formative moments in my development as a photobook editor.

Educated in the Photojournalistic Realm

Two moments are etched in my memory that are linked to my first editing experiences. The first moment took place on Sunday, February 15, 1998. It was the day after my daughter Julia was born. Somewhere in November of the previous year, I received a phone call from a World Press Photo employee congratulating me as my design for the World Press Photo Yearbook was selected as the winner out of four entries. The designers who were short-listed to take part in this design competition made their design proposals by using the winning photos from previous years. Apart from designing a number of book covers, I had no experience with book design. I had never designed a photobook before. That Sunday, the editorial committee of the yearbook would meet to brainstorm on the photographic edit of the 1998 yearbook. I was nervous. The editorial committee consisted of Adriaan Monshouwer, curator and director of the Dutch Photo Institute; photographer Bart Nieuwenhuis; managing director of World Press Photo Marloes Krijnen; and myself. I hardly participated in the editorial process. The committee used a lot of references from photographic and photojournalistic history that I didn't know anything about. The decision-making went so fast, I remember that while I was bending over a light table and carefully studying a slide, which showed a photograph of a crowd in protest carrying a huge red flag, the others finished the selection of half of the book. When I arrived home to start applying the proposals put forward by the editorial committee to a layout, I felt both excited and disappointed. Excited because I found the process of heated discussion and photographic selection very intriguing; disappointed because I wasn't able to contribute anything meaningful to this process. I did make my own primitive observations but had no vocabulary to express this. I realized that I wanted to be better prepared for the following year and decided to start a part-time study of photography.

The second moment occurred shortly before the first. Two days a week, I worked at the weekly magazine Vrij Nederland as a desktop-publishing operator. There was minimal hierarchy in the editing room, that is to say, there was a chief editor and a final editor, but the function of art director or photo editor did not exist. Joop van Tijn and Rinus Ferdinandusse were the “combined” editors-in-chief, and controlled all the strings. One day I had to lay out an article with photos by Dutch photographer Ad van Denderen. It was a story about the Jewish settlement Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip. Joop indicated which photos should be included in the article and also pointed out the main photo, the one that should be placed on the double-page spread of the opening. I did what I was told. I subconsciously qualified most of the photos as reportage photos. A photo of kids playing on top of a tank, a photo of Ariel Sharon on tour, one of men in prayer, another of settlers carrying Uzis to protect the community.

Suddenly my eye spotted a different photo. I was looking at a beach scene, a family who'd gathered under a black-and-white-striped cloth arranged like a tent for shade. On the left of the photo was a girl around seven years old. She had wrapped herself in a striped towel. In the other corner of the picture, a toddler was sleeping in a buggy. Behind the buggy, I saw a picnic cooler, slightly tilted in the sand. Behind that was an adult woman sleeping on a white plaid blanket and, behind that, another woman was looking at some sort of glass jar that she held in her hands. As I recall this photograph, I remember thinking, “Is there a fish swimming in the jar?” Two bent legs protruded from behind the woman with the ball. It was unclear whether this person was part of the depicted family or not. In the distance, along the tide line, three other beach guests were taking a walk. It was a hazy day.

I found the photo fascinating and believed it could be a great opening photograph. I was able to connect to this image. I thought of a vacation in Bibione with my family at age fourteen. It also reminded me of a scene from the movie Death in Venice (dir. Luchino Visconti) in which the main character, Gustav von Aschenbach, played by Dirk Bogarde, is mesmerized by the young Tadzio playing with his friends on the beach. It was a movie that my high school German teacher advised me to watch. I first finished the layout with the opening photograph that Joop proposed and saved the file before I started to work on my alternative layout. The moment I was importing my alternative “beach” photograph into the large frame of the opening spread, Joop happened to walk by. “I pointed out the other photograph as the opening,” he said. My cheeks started to blush. “I did use that photo,” I said, “but I also wanted to try something else.” “Why?” Joop asked. “Um, I thought this photograph was different,” I said. “Different?” he replied. “Yes, not so reportage-like, more of a Visconti-like aesthetic.” “Guys,” Joop shouted to make sure everyone in the editing room had his attention, “Teun thinks this photo has a Visconti-like aesthetic.” After much discussion, the photo was eventually chosen as the opening photo, and the caption read: “A day at the beach. It could have been a scene from a Visconti film, except there usually aren't armed family members patrolling” (fig. 3).²

Step-by-step, I was starting to understand how the editing process works. I understood that I should have a certain knowledge of photography and that if I have responsibility for editorial choices, I must have knowledge of the specific subject. That makes sense.

Through my design work for World Press Photo, I also learned about the iconic power of the photograph. I learned that powerful photographs resemble icons or well-known statues and paintings, often from Western art history—depictions of the Pietà, the Madonna, the crucifixion of Jesus. Those are powerful symbols, but I also detected a form of rumination in them, a symbolism that reinvents itself over and over again in an unconscious urge for personal success or an assumed authentic mission to give a voice to the voiceless. The documentary photographer often continues to follow previously trodden paths and therefore regularly encounters clichés and simplified and stereotyped translations of reality.

Comparing Editing Styles

The great thing about photobook workshops is that they represent a condensed representation of the diversity of the photographic realm. Often the group of students attending a workshop consists of a variety of photographers, photojournalists, and documentary photographers who work both traditionally and conceptually and are open to more-poetic or even abstract approaches. But workshop attendees also include photographers who work in an applied way, such as commercial photographers, fashion photographers, or artistic photographers who work autonomously. However, much of the work I see in the workshops is deeply rooted in documentary photography. When I listen to the heated discussions that take place when we are discussing someone's work, I notice that almost all of the attendees have a strong tendency to speak from their knowledge of art history, more specifically, the history of photography, as well as their knowledge of geography, history, and culture. The whole spectrum of verbal intellectuality is used in such discussions. This certainly produces intense and interesting dialogues that often lead to surprising new insights. I also observe, however, that this intellectual spectacle often diverts attention from a visually concentrated examination of the photographs and that we do not give enough credit to the photograph itself.

World Press Photo has been organizing the annual Joop Swart Masterclass since 1994. Since 1999 in Amsterdam, six masters who would be classed as industry peers in international photojournalism have been paired with twelve young photographic talents selected from all across the world. Rena Effendi, Newsha Tavakolian, Hajime Kamura, Veejay Villafranca, and Sarker Protick are among the alumni who come from and are engaged with Asian worlds. During the course of a week, an exciting exchange of knowledge takes place through lectures and reflection on the participants work and their editing. In 2015, I was invited as one of the six masters. Three of the masters were photographers, the other three were editors. The editors included Meaghan Looram, photo editor of the New York Times; Claudine Boeglin, multimedia producer and one of the founders of Magnum in Motion; and myself (fig. 4). As a test, the three editors were asked to edit a photographic work in their own specific way. Jonathan Torgovnik, photographer and one of the other three masters, offered to use one of his photo series that he had not previously shown to other photographic professionals. It was a photo series of a community illegally living in an empty building in Cape Town. For the sake of clarity, I am only focusing on the difference between the editing exercises that Meaghan and I produced. Meaghan started first. Her method could best be described as searching for the meaning of the photos, concerned with the more literal tenets of journalism, the who, what, where, why, and when. Who are the people in the photos? What are they doing? Where is it? When did this scene take place? And why are they doing this? Meaghan carefully selected a number of photographs that most clearly gave an explanation of these questions and compiled a selection that she could have easily published in the well-known newspaper for which she works.

Then it was my turn. My way of selecting photos is strongly connected to a representation in book form. Whereas Meaghan has to consider the space on a page for five or six photos, as this is the average length of an article in the New York Times, my medium is more extensive. The reading of a photobook involves a longer length of time. I understood from Jonathan that the users of the empty building depicted in his images were mainly homeless people and addicts. I was drawn to some pictures of the outside facade of the building, with the South African sun shining hard and bright on the stucco walls that were peeling. The photographs Jonathan had shot inside the building were generally quite dark, something that made sense to me, since I assumed there was no electricity in the building. Most of the windows, if there at all, were taped and kept most of the daylight out. While looking at this work, I tried to put myself in the position of Jonathan or even one of the residents. I imagined myself walking in the harsh bright sunlight of Cape Town and entering the building through its barricaded entrance, the pupils within my eyes, constricted by the bright light, having to dilate. Such a process takes a while. In my imaginary walk, I focused on this aspect. Bit by bit some contours emerged, contours that transitioned into vague colors that become slightly brighter as the moments pass. Do I sense movement a few meters away from me? Could that be an animal or maybe a human?

I searched for Jonathan's darkest photographs, in which you can hardly distinguish anything. I found a few. I thought of Kazimir Malevich's Black Square. I selected some photographs in which only some horizontal and vertical dark shapes were visible. I then looked for photographs that were a bit lighter, in which I already recognized an interior space. In one photograph I detected some garbage in the corner of a room. The image was so dark that I could hardly see any color. In the next photo, in which a streak of light entered the environment, a number of colors were recognizably reflected.

I slowly tried to build up the story before including photographs in which I introduced a human figure. I started to think such an edit could be the beginning of a book. I imagined readers flipping through a series of dark, abstract photographs, asking themselves what they mean—after which, bit by bit, this selection of abstract compositions would change into a story that becomes more perceptible.

Simple Cells and Declarative Memory

I wanted to know more about visual observation. Search engines informed me that visual observation can be divided into early and later observation. I reached out to the University of Amsterdam and found Cyriel Pennartz, professor of the neuroscience of cognition and systems and one of the leaders of the European Human Brain Project, who was so kind to answer my emails. He advised me to read his book De code van het bewustzijn, which he published in 2021 (the English translation, The Consciousness Network: How the Brain Creates Our Reality, was published in 2024). The book describes that sight consists of visual stimuli that reach a range of parts of the brain via the retinas in our eyes. The occipital lobe, located at the back of the cerebrum, is reached first through a complex system of various intermediate stations. Here, elementary characteristics or basal marks such as color, shape, location, movement, and so on are analyzed in early visual stations.

What is analyzed in the early stations happens rapidly and largely unconsciously. These are also referred to as pre-attentive and “bottom-up” processes, meaning that a large part of the analysis already occurs before we are aware of it, creating a general image out of several specific visual analyses. On the other hand, association, the connection to meaning, occurs in higher visual stations. This form of associative observation is more “top-down,” moving toward the specific and controlled by processes such as attention and memory. Pre-attentive or bottom-up processes are characterized by an absence of higher-level direction in sensory processing, whereas a top-down process is characterized by a high level of direction of sensory processing involving more cognition, such as setting goals or targets.

De code van het bewustzijn describes that our cerebral cortex consists of a hierarchy with lower and higher areas. Our memory is connected to areas like the entorhinal cortex and the hippocampus. Memory is a wide concept. According to Pennartz, procedural memory, responsible for our motorial behavior, is distinguished from declarative memory, which is responsible for our ability to tell a story about the past. Furthermore, the declarative memory has a semantic part and an episodic part. The semantic part is connected to the storage of factual knowledge such as the knowledge we learned from schoolbooks, the expertise we gained throughout our careers, or the information we picked up from the news. The episodic part is connected to the episodes of our past that we have directly experienced ourselves and that are therefore stored more vividly and sensorily, like the memory of how your parents helped you to ride a bike for the first time—including the feeling of excitement, the color of the bike, the smell of the grass. If we look at a situation or an image, then our hippocampus will not only receive information from the cortex but will also send information back. This hippocampal output will first reach higher regions in the temporal lobe connected to memory and from there on will activate the higher visual areas in the temporal and occipital lobe.

So visual observation is a process that takes time and consists of the analysis of basal marks and a complex analysis in higher stations. I realized that a substantial part of my way of studying photographs is connected to analyzing these so-called basal marks, concentrating on color and shape, on direction or location, asking myself where the most striking object appears in a composition or what gives a photograph a sense of movement. The latter is often translated through sharpness and blurriness and can be seen as a form of photographic texture. I also concentrate on atmosphere, which is usually represented by light and dark, and finally, on body language and facial expression.

Professor Pennartz furthermore describes that many brain cells in the early stations have selectively equipped tasks. Researchers David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1981, conducted research into the activity of brain cells at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in the late 1950s. Hubel's Nobel Prize lecture describing this work was subsequently published in the journal Nature in 1982.³ They were able to convert electrical voltage differences into sound by means of electrodes that they stuck into parts of the brain. By chance, they discovered that many cells in the V1 area of the brain, which is part of the middle temporal region in the occipital lobe, only responded to various rectangular rods of different sizes. The loudspeakers in their experiment remained silent with other visual stimuli. So it appears that many cells in our brain have been assigned to very specific tasks. We have cells for specific shapes, such as horizontal bars, cells for color, for perception of space, for movement, for light, for dark. If these cells are stimulated with exactly those shapes, colors, movement, and other things for which evolution has developed them, they will begin to fire violently, while other stimuli will keep them silent. Hubel referred to them as “simple cells.”⁴

In the editing exercise that I describe above, both Meaghan and I used our declarative memory, the part of our brain that gives us the ability to tell a story. One could argue that Meaghan mainly used her semantic memory, appealing to the factual knowledge she possesses and to the knowledge held by the future readers of the New York Times. For my input in the edit, one could say that I mostly used my episodic memory alongside a higher awareness of my simple cells. That said, I didn't fully shut down the semantic part of my memory, just as Meaghan would have used elements of her episodic memory and sections of her early visual stations. I recently spoke with Meaghan (pers. comm., April 21, 2023) and had the chance to discuss my thoughts with her. She replied that as a journalist, it is her job to bear witness and that she wants to make sure the images she publishes do just that. Further, she explained, it is the mission of journalism to help the readers better understand the world, and as a news editor she will always be seeking a clear and communicative narrative arc, one that illuminates and describes an event or issue rather than interpreting or obscuring it. She also mentioned that she saw parallels with my process and that she recognized the search for meaning in a broad way:

Maybe a better way of describing the difference between Meaghan's and my editing process is that she let her semantic memory be the key driver of her decision making while compiling her edit and, in my case, my simple cells had their hands on the steering wheel with my episodic memory in the codriver's seat. I have never been to Cape Town nor near the building Jonathan photographed. But for this editing exercise, I used my personal and vivid memory of how it is to suddenly go from an environment with bright sunlight into a dark space as inspiration.

Trial-and-Error is Internally Performing

The fundamental aspect of editing is to look at a large number of photographs. I previously described the situation in which a large selection of photographs is spread out on several tables, what I've called a work island. In order not to be distracted by a potential hierarchy of the physical objects, it is best to print all the photographs the same size, preferably 10 × 15 cm or 4 × 6 in. This size is small enough to get an impression of the edit at a glance and is just large enough to be able to assess the photo as an autonomous image. Editing is a physical undertaking. I stand back from the photographs to experience a good overview. To inspect an image, I come forward to pick it up and bring it closer to my eyes, focusing on details like the composition, the use of light, and other characteristics of the photo.

I want to mention here that I prefer to do editing experiments by myself. In the past I often edited together with the photographer, but over time I have learned that this doesn't provide enough freedom or flexibility. By focusing on each other, each is less concentrated on the work. By working alone, I am allowed to do whatever flashes through my brain, I am allowed to execute stupid ideas, to make mistakes. Later, I share the ideas that occur in this process with the photographer. I experience the intense discussions, the counteredits and the uncomfortable feelings that are part of this process as a more intense form of collaboration than editing in each other's presence.

On the one hand, I'm interested in what the photographs show me that might be a bit further away from the authors concept, something that might be captured in the images that is more subconscious. On the other hand, I sometimes detect that, according to my subjective opinion, the available photographs miss an essential element of the author's concept. Listening to the photographer's explanation, I often visualize images that are not represented in his or her selection of photographs.

During this scanning, I mainly try to concentrate on the elements analyzed by the early visual stations in my brain. I look for basal elements: shapes, the appearance of light and dark, the presence of texture and color. A concrete example is the editing exercise I described above, where three editors were allowed to edit and comment on Jonathan's story. I mentioned earlier that I came up with the idea to create a sequence that would give the reader the feeling of stepping into the dark and undergoing the experience of one's eyes having to get used to the light. But that idea would never have occurred to me if Jonathan's series hadn't included a significant number of dark photos; the idea was ingrained in his series. I noticed this because I concentrated on the elementary characteristics in Jonathan's photographs, characteristics that are purely visual and can only be captured by the photographic medium. Still, this does not explain how I decide if a specific photo appeals to me. Obviously, a big part of that decision process is subjective. My main drive is to look for different photographs, ones that I haven't seen before. That doesn't mean I'm indifferent to photographs that are considered aesthetically successful, but I'm more interested in strange, unusual, or even uncanny photographs. Stanley Greene, the American photojournalist, once said to me of my photo choices: “Compared to other editors, you somehow always pick out the weird ones.” After I have collected a number of unique photographs in this way, a process of comparison begins. I pick up one photograph and compare it to another, focusing mainly on the basal elements I mentioned before. I try not to intellectually interpret why two photographs would fit well together, try to make my semantic memory lay low, meanwhile keeping myself as open as possible to see what happens by chance. It is a trial-and-error process.

In the mid-1930s, Edward Chace Tolman, American psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, devised an experiment with rats. He built a plateau on which a rat had to jump over a gap twenty centimeters wide to land in front of a door that either lead to a reward or to nothing. Tolman discovered that before a rat takes the plunge, it has a moment of hesitation, as if it is weighing its options. This behavior was named “vicarious trial and error” (VTE). The animal is internally performing one or more actions virtually. Tolman observed that the amount of VTE behavior keeps pace with the animal's learning behavior.

So, the trial-and-error process is an activity that is intrinsically connected with learning. To use trial and error in the editing process means putting your existing knowledge aside and being as open as possible to the surprises that present themselves in the comparison of two images. After the discovery of such surprising matches, you continue to search for the next comparison. It is a very time-consuming process, but I find it intensely satisfying. Moving around the editing table in circles; looking at the photographs from all directions, upside down and from the side; bending your body and stretching your arm to pick up a photograph while your eyes are zooming in: all are physical activities that strongly influence the decision-making process. If photography is a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional reality, I therefore believe it is crucial for a visual storyteller to reconnect to this three-dimensional space and make the most use of all the senses to fully influence the sculpting that takes place inside the mind. Appel's description, “earthy,”’ fits this process quite well.

Make It Personal

In addition to concentrated looking, I find it equally important to study and listen to the motivation, the passion, and the explanation of the photographer. Since I'm not on the search for the best illustrations of the information and anecdotes they are sharing, I give my brain the chance to visualize their information in a personal way. This is happening automatically. While I'm listening to the photographer's story, my brain conjures up all kinds of images. It is a process similar to reading a novel, where you crawl into the brain of the writer, but you, as the reader, visualize their words with your own mental images. The rented room of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, is located somewhere under the roof of a five-story building in St. Petersburg. When I read the novel, slowly identifying myself with Rodion as I went along, my brain projected, in razor sharp images, my first student room in the Enschotsestraat in Tilburg, complete with the oak orange crates that served as a bookcase.

Sometimes those internally created images lead to ideas that I share with the photographer. It's like I'm playing a game of Ping-Pong with them. It may be that this inspires them to make new images. It might also be possible that these reflections remind them of images from their archive that, after being reinterpreted, may also fit into the story. It may be that it leads to adding other visual material such as historical or amateur photos, archival documents, or ephemera, or that it leads to a collaboration with other visual makers. If such an exchange occurs during a workshop, there are, sadly, only limited possibilities to execute resulting ideas due to the lack of time. But in my regular practice, in which the amount of time that I work on a book project is often between a year and a half and two years, this active interaction with the photographer often leads to the development of essential parts of the visual narrative. And often the magic is not necessarily in the extra elements that have been added to the work, but simply is hidden in what is legible in the connections between the photographs. There is meaning encapsulated in the breaks.

The Prologue to Poulomi Basu's Centralia

I met Poulomi in early 2015 in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where she was one of the students in a photobook workshop that I taught at Chobi Mela, the biennial international festival of photography. In 2016 she took part in another workshop that Sandra and I taught together with Ying Ang at the Bronx Documentary Center in New York in which she started to work on a book that later became Centralia, winner of the 2020 Rencontres d'Arles Discovery Award Main Jury Prize, the 2020 Singapore International Photo Festival Best Published Photobook of the Year, and the 2020 National Geographic Explorer Award and nominee for the 2021 Deutsche Börse Foundation Photoraphy Prize. At the time, Poulomi was making a shift from documentary photography to a more fictional approach. The story deals with an under-reported conflict between Maoist rebels and the Indian state in Chhattisgarh. It is the Indigenous people who bore the brunt of this conflict. The work she brought to the workshop was quite comprehensive: landscapes, portraits, crime scenes, photographs of the rebel community, images of traditional Indian festivals, a video made by a local journalist, PDFs of Maoist schoolbooks, and a series of pixeled portraits of young female martyrs. Poulomi's own photographs were shot in different formats: analogue photographs in both square and medium format as well as digital images. Altogether this made for an intriguing hodgepodge of visual imagery.

I didn't immediately grasp Poulomi's story. It was as if she had captured a mood rather than an explanation. I decided to focus on this mood and noticed I was particularly drawn to her landscape photographs. They included images of burning coal fields, shot at night, and photographs of forests that had an eerie red glow, probably due to a long exposure time (figs. 9–12).

While I was collecting the landscape images, noticing that there were many, I thought of the opening scene of Werner Herzog's film Aguirre, the Wrath of God. In this scene, the camera shows a mountainous landscape, shrouded in the mist. The camera slowly zooms in until we discover tiny little moving specks that turn out to be figures who are slowly descending the slopes. I remembered the speed with which Herzog zooms in on the group of Spanish conquistadors as almost agonizing slow, as if he wants to bring the viewer into a trance, but when I recently rewatched the scene, it turned out to be much faster. I experimented with a similar beginning for Poulomi's book, thinking of a slow, poetic prologue of moody landscapes using cinematic repetition. Although I was enchanted by the mystical dark mood in her landscapes, I didn't want to start with a photograph taken at night. I selected a photograph of a misty landscape taken at dusk, with shades of turquoise and boysenberry in it, the top of a hill perfectly centered in the frame (fig. 5). The second photograph is of fireworks, taken at one of the festivals—but by putting it second in the sequence, one imagines the hill in the first photograph is erupting. The third photograph is a night image of a burning coal field (fig. 6). The following photographs slowly zoom in on a fire (fig. 7). I flipped through many photographs of these fires. Some of them were taken so close to the bright flame that they were overexposed with no photographic information left in the brightest parts. Traditionally such photographs are seen as failures, but these intrigued me. What if I printed them on ivory paper and slowly zoomed in on the fires, ending in an empty spread? I wondered. I asked Poulomi to rewrite one of her texts as poetry to be placed in this empty spread (fig. 8). I then noticed an amazing photograph of a dog at night walking through a forest (fig. 12). Poulomi's flash turned the animal into an illuminating silhouette—a perfect ending for the prologue I was imagining. I needed to work toward that photograph. The photographs of the glowing forest worked well to lead up to this (figs. 9–11), as if the fires in the first half of the prologue were throwing a warm light on the tree trunks in the forest photographs. I continued sequencing more abstract forest images before introducing the dog. But no matter what I tried, I could not make the photo of the dog fit in properly; it appeared too abrupt. Together with Poulomi, I started to experiment with double exposures of the abstract landscapes and some of the more straightforward portraits. Using the more complex and layered double exposures to build up toward the photo of the dog turned out to be the solution. The result is a dreamlike narration, lending its sequential logic from transitions in colors, moods, simple forms, and alteration of light and dark.

The way of editing that I originally learned at the offices of Vrij Nederland and World Press Photo was mainly based on knowledge. In general, the Western school system is extremely focused on generating theoretical knowledge. We are trained, mainly through the usage of verbal and written language, to be able to share this knowledge eloquently. We are much less adept at describing knowledge and feelings arising from visual observations. It is as if the existing vocabulary in the verbal and written language is inadequate for this.

The visual stories in the photobooks I design are often as complex as life itself. The awareness that an image is created in our brains, that it is constructed via a complex analysis in which simple cells play an important role and where interpretation is both influenced by personal experiences as well as by semantic knowledge, gave me a wider palette to play with—a palette that is necessary to create the stories we need today.

Notes

References