Print, Hold, Spend: Making a £175 Consumer Photobook and What It Taught Me

This article is partly a process note and partly a reflection on working with a consumer photobook service. It comes out of a small group project to make books for an in-store display, but it became, for me, more about what happens when photographs are taken off the screen and printed to exist as physical objects. What follows is not a review of the service, but an account of how making a single £175 consumer photobook affected how I worked with sequencing and the materiality of printed photographs.

A fellow photographer invited a small group to put together photobooks. Her brief to us was simple: create a photobook with your work that could be placed on a shelf in a shop.

The photobooks went on display in a Central London photography store. While promoting our work may not have been the shop’s main aim (which was, of course, promoting their photobook services by showing concrete examples), the arrangement nevertheless created a small, informal exhibition. Customers (not everyone, but at least some…) could potentially pause, pick up a book, and spend time with it. At any rate, it was an opportunity for work to exist physically. In addition, each photographer could arrange to take their book from the shop display for a few days at a time and show it elsewhere.

What follows brings together all the images from the book, along with some thoughts on how it was put together, how this photobook project changed the way I see this particular set of photographs (and perhaps printed and bound photographs more generally), and how a photobook might shape a viewer’s experience.

The framework of the project was loose. There were two pre-designed cover options, each using a photograph from the selection, along with a title, name, and a short biography placed either at the beginning or the end. Beyond that, each book was ours to shape.

I titled mine “London is Nothing like the Houses I Never Entered.” The size and cost of the book made something clear early on: this was not a mass-production exercise. My version (72 pages, overall size 40 × 50 cm, printed area on photographic paper 39 × 49 cm, bound) retails at £175 for a single copy (at the time of writing, approximately €210 or US$231). The cost was covered by the store as part of the exchange.

The usual customer for this kind of service is someone preserving photographs of weddings, holidays, or milestones. The result is a polished object, with a hard cover, lay-flat spreads, and substantial photographic paper.

When the book arrived and I held it for the first time, it did not feel like a finished statement. It felt like a working object. Beyond being a sort of prototype for me, the book started to show how sequence, scale, and simply holding printed images changes how you read them.

Images and the difference created by physical presence

I saw the images in a completely different way from how I see them on a screen. A photobook is different from online “content”. On screen, images move in a constant stream. Most are glanced at and quickly replaced. Much of it is about presentation, selling, or simply giving way to the next image.

With the photobook, I noticed something else. It has to be opened, held, supported. In the case of my particular book, it is large and heavy (well over 1 kg), so it does not invite casual handling.

“Tactile” is the overused word often applied to anything analogue or physical in photography these days. But that word feels incomplete when trying to describe the experience of a photobook. I think “sensorial” is closer. When you hold the book, there is the faint smell of ink (the printing is inkjet, pigment on photographic paper, not chromogenic C-type), and even the glue used in the binding process. There is also the texture of the pages, the weight in the hands, and the sound of turning pages.These things matter because they slow you down. They make you notice where each image appears in a sequence, what came before, and what comes next.

Photographs set inside a book become part of something that unfolds in time. Turning the page is a shift, because one image gives way to another. That change of pace affects how you read the work, and asks for attention towards relationships between images, not just individual photographs.

People who saw the book responded to its physical presence. Some talked about individual images, some about the selection. Others reacted simply to its size and presence. A few, perhaps used to scrolling, only looked at a handful of pages. At a business hub where I left the book for a few days on a table at the entrance, someone who runs a gardening company told me it made her think about gathering some photographs of her own work and putting them into a physical form she could place in the hands of potential customers. In that sense, she responded to the book itself rather than to its contents. Others said that the photobook looked expensive, and wondered about the cost.

Making the Book

As mentioned at the outset, the book was made using a consumer service.  This means that the service was designed to make things simple: there is no soft proofing, no fine control over colour management, and no choice of paper beyond glossy or matte. Much of the technical side, colour handling, rendering, file preparation, is hidden from the user. It assumes no specialist knowledge and takes you straight to a finished object. If it looks right on screen, it will most likely look acceptable in the printed book. This is very different from a professional printing service, where costs would be significantly higher for each individual print.

The platform tools were basic and felt somewhat clumsy, so I designed the text pages outside the system and brought them into the book-making tool as JPEGs. I did not make any edits within the platform. The photographs had already been selected and sequenced, so only minor cropping was needed. Uploading and assembling the book took about an hour and a half.

The printed area of 39 × 49 cm landscape format meant that the page size determined a 4:3 format. The photographs I had selected were either originally 4:3 or, if they were 2:3, they could be cropped to fit. I used full bleed so the page itself became the frame.

Sequencing and selecting the images for the book

Each right-hand page carries a single photograph. Each left-hand page carries text in the form of questions.

The scenes I selected depict something at the edge of happening. It may be just before something completes, or just after it starts to fall away, without resolving into an event.

Each image suggests a moment of shadow projection, where hidden tensions or private states (e.g. fatigue, ritual, nostalgia, belonging) simmer just beneath the surface. Nothing is staged or constructed, all the scenes were “found”, “encountered” or “stumbled upon”, and in many, something may feel slightly out of balance, as though the familiar has shifted or is about to shift into something less fixed.

As an example of this kind of selection, a photograph taken in North Kensington in London days after a devastating fire in the Grenfell Tower (a block of flats) that claimed so many lives, shows a man crouched beneath a tree near the site. Yellow ribbons hang in the background. He looks down at a sheet of paper with names. The scene feels held, not settled.

Seen in sequence, the 34 photographs do not form a story in the usual sense. They are not part of a direct narrative line. What emerges for me is a series of brief moments where something from private life seems to touch the surface of public space, and then it disappears again. The sequence begins and ends near St Martin-in-the-Fields, and this location point helps form a loose loop.

Encountering the photobook physically

In print, the effort of handling the book changed how I looked at the images. I turn pages, feel the paper, and perhaps stay longer with each image. I noticed the same reaction in others when I showed the book.  The size of the book matters, this one is not easy to hold casually. The landscape format seems to push movement. It feels directional, like progression in a story.

Encountering the photobook on a screen

Online, things are different. Images move quickly and, admittedly, can potentially reach far more people than anything printed. What is lost, however, is the physical side of the work: scale, weight, paper, and the rhythm of turning pages. Screen and book ask for different kinds of attention.

In this 35mmc version, the contents of the photobook have been reconfigured for the screen. The book itself is landscape and designed to be experienced horizontally as a sequence of spreads, whereas this article is read vertically through scrolling.

The essay I prepared for the photobook is included here in full. The questions that appear on the left-hand pages of the book are carried as captions to the images in this article.

The essay from the photobook

The essay that follows appears in the book. I wanted words alongside the photographs, but not with the idea to try to explain the images.

London Is Nothing Like the Houses I Never Entered

“One cannot see one’s shadow unless it is cast upon a surface somewhere. So we project it upon our neighbours, either in the street, or on the next nation, or on a political party, or on the boss at the office, or on one’s wife or husband.” (Marie-Louise von Franz, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974.)

The title of this photobook comes from a contradiction that remains unresolved. London, as I experience it, is always shifting. Its streets are open to view, and its life unfolds on the surface for anyone passing by. The houses I never entered belong to another order of existence: private, unseen. The two are different worlds, yet they are bound together. What is sealed within those interiors leaves faint traces outside, shadows that pass briefly across faces and gestures, and may be projected onto the urban space in many different ways. Behind every person is a private life of work and rest, worries, joys, and longings that remains unseen by others. And although what is hidden inside those houses may be projected onto the city’s surfaces, London is not an extension of them. A shadow is, at most, only a brief trace that touches the visible world before disappearing again.

A person resting with eyes closed in sunlight might simply be pausing to breathe. Or perhaps the shape of the scene carries an undertone of distance, or it could appear to the observer as the epitome of solitude. What matters is not arriving at certainty, but awareness of such possibilities. To me, the city offers a surface, and I keep reading from it all the time.

This photobook, therefore, grew out of one assumption and one realisation. The assumption is that, as we move through shared urban spaces, we can observe at least fleeting signs of those unseen worlds. These are not facts but possibilities that arise through chance, light, and gesture, becoming visible only through the persistence of our own perception. The realisation is that, on any given day, we pass so many lives we will never come to know. The people who fill the city’s streets, parks, stations, and public spaces also inhabit worlds unseen to us, enclosed and private.

In photographing moments in urban spaces, I have also come to recognise yet another dimension, that what I think of as a projection upon the city’s surface may at times be my own.

Each act of seeing might retrieve a fragment of shadow I have cast outward, allowing it to return as something seen, and more conscious, within myself.

The people in these photographs are the people of London. They might be locals, tourists, day-trippers, staff of businesses or institutions, students, the retired, the unseen. Someone waits for a taxi. Another spoon-feeds a child next to a video projection. A group bursts onto the street in front of an Underground station, chanting about the national team’s participation in a football match. Since I have never entered their houses, never known more than what I saw when I photographed, these pictures invite reflection not on what exactly is there, but on what could be imagined or felt. A man stands slightly away from the kerb, his eyes on a mobile phone, a taxi idling beside him as daylight slips into evening. The tension might rest between his presence in that space and his connection to a distant, digital one. Or it might lie elsewhere, in the pressure of deadlines, the demands of responsibility, or the wish to disappear for a moment into distraction.

Each photograph holds open a space for interpretation, leaving room for both the seen and the potential of the unseen. The question is not what these moments mean, but what they might suggest.

Projections take many forms: a sharp expression, a fleeting withdrawal, a show of strength, or a glimpse of vulnerability. The traces that are projected (of status, frustration, loneliness, duty, or conformity) may become visible in posture or stillness, or in the way people occupy space, near or far from each other.

The scenes depicted in this photobook are mostly drawn from moments when streets, parks, museums, or any public place seem to be changing their presence, as though time briefly shifts and something otherwise hidden moves closer to sight. People may be caught between actions. Spaces may look momentarily emptied. My attention stays on the external world. The images in this photobook come directly from it, without staging or direction. Each photograph stands alone, but together they trace the outlines of lives that leave a shadow on the surface of the city before fading back into the unseen.

Since 2015 I have photographed in and around London during my commutes, sometimes during lunch breaks, on my way to part- time jobs or freelance assignments, or during wanderings through different parts of the city. The only discipline was to remain an observer, always carrying a camera to keep my attention ready. None of these photographs were taken with the camera function of my phone.

Closing reflections

Taken together, these elements describe partly a process and partly what I observed: how the book was made, how it changed the way I see a set of photographs, and how a photobook might shape a reader’s experience of looking at photographs.

A consumer photobook is usually a private object. Using that format for work meant for wider viewing creates a tension, because it borrows a format typically used for preserving memories, but here it is used as a working structure.

Printing did not bring a conclusion to my thinking behind this series of photographs. It extended it. Once the photographs are fixed in sequence and held in the hand, they seem to behave differently. What looked like separate images starts to connect with elements of relationship and rhythm.

Making this single book, therefore, feels like the beginning of something else.

Featured Image: Front Cover of the photobook.

I wish to thank Veronica Skoglund for the invitation to take part in the photobook project, for coordinating the participation of the group, for designing the front cover using one of my images, and for helping me select that image from my series. Thanks also to Sofia Berto for reading and commenting on an early version of the essay I included in the photobook.

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