After spending several weeks thinking about Trump and his presidency, I was ready for a change of protagonist. For this project, I chose to look at Kennedy, a president whom I admire, and whose political ideals I share. I began by looking into his Presidential Library archive, wanting to work with archival images rather than illustrations this time.
In the first iteration of the project, I envisioned creating a book that would use archival images in unconventional ways.
That experiment turned out to be too esoteric, and did not communicate effectively the narrative I was trying to tell. So I went in the opposite direction and tried a more traditional approach using both text and images. The texts were chosen from contemporary fiction and non-fiction sources that felt appropriate to the image and also fed into the narrative of Kennedy’s life story.
This experiment felt too pedestrian and sentimental for the subject matter, so I decided to go back to simply using archival images. In the next iteration, I wanted to simulate the feeling of exploring an archive and created small booklets organized by keywords.
This also resulted in a prosaic outcome, one that was only helped by an accident with an electric guillotine. After printing, I was trimming the ends and one of the booklets slipped and was cut at a funny angle. Though completely unintentional, it gave me the idea of printing the images directly onto shapes which could then be arranged by viewers.