∴ How to Make a Photo Book Feel Different ∴

Four Lessons from Minnan Exit and Wen-You Cai

I wrote recently about participating in Seoul’s biggest art book fair. For 3 days I was with more than 200 book sellers, amongst what must have been thousands of photo, illustration and art books. I bought exactly one.

In Minnan Exit, photographer Wen-You Cai (Chinese, though born in Japan and living in New York) returns to her family’s hometown of Quanzhou, Fujian, to attend the funerals of her deceased relatives. Her great-grandmother passed away in 2015, followed shortly thereafter by her grandfather. As she puts it, ‘The era of the older generation reaching the end of life had arrived for our family.’

The funerals were complex with rituals and traditions unfamiliar to her. When I spoke with Te Editions, the editors/publishers of the book, they told me as an example there were times when she was supposed to cry, and times she wasn’t allowed to cry at all. A professional had to be hired to guide both the family and the procession itself. Minnan Exit documents both the funerals in a way that puts you there with her, feeling the same sense of confusion in the midst of a poignant, yet loving setting, steeped in grief, tenderness and inevitability.

Let me tell you why Minnan Exit stood out, and what it does so well to feel different.

Personalizing Perspective

One of Cai’s achievements with this book is to imbue the imagery with a sense of being from her direct perspective. If feels as if we’re seeing through her eyes. This works so well because by seeing through her eyes, the entire experience is subjectified. This encourages the imagery to carry with it the emotions that you would be feeling iIf you were in that situation. Documentary photography can often come off cold,, but Minnan Exit side-steps any sense of detachment by humanizing its perspective.

Time spent in someone else’s perspective begins to work on us, slowly making us feel like we’re the ones there, watching and participating in preparing the offerings and dressing the bodies. This is particularly effective in communicating the sense of confusion Cai must have felt participating in these rituals with little understanding of what comes next or what it means.

An early image in the sequence, giving us the sense of entering into the scene.

The book also begins with an essay from Cai explaining her history and what it meant to photograph these experiences.

Showing What Can’t Be Seen

The next success of Minnan Exit is in how its use of personal perspective reveals the invisible bounds of family dynamics. The family on display in this book is big, and it’s not always clear who belongs to it, and who is on the periphery. But Cai wades into the messiness of how a family relates to each other by allowing for messy images. In many of the images in the book, there lies underneath the captured action a sense of unspoken family dynamics, hierarchies and affections. These subtleties thicken the experience of the book, making it not just a documentation of funerals, but also an examination of the ways we share life.

Division into Chapters

This is a simple one, but I found the division into chapters very effective. This is a relatively wordy photo book, and chapters help you feel like you’re progressing as a reader, and suggest there’ll be a limited time spent with each particular aspect of the overall subject. Something about that formatting makes me much more inclined to read the book over multiple sittings, rather than how I typically read them - all at once.

The chapters are:

• Trying to Accept My Mortality

• One-Stop Service

• Immeasurable Merit

• A Funeral Talk

Enter Editors

This stood out as particularly unique to me, and I don’t recall seeing it elsewhere: The editors were a visible part of the book. At one point they interview the funeral director for Cai’s family, including their impressions of him, ‘A-Bue is slender and dark-skinned, an extremely reticent middle-aged fellow who, based on our brief interaction, is an honest man that hates troubling others.’

Books of this sort are always produced by the shared efforts of the artist and the editor. But editing is an often invisible art, working best when it goes unnoticed. The choice here though, to give voice to the editors, makes the book feel like a communal attempt at sense-making. Suddenly, it’s not us trying to understand the book alone, but the artist, the editor and us trying to understand the subject together. There’s something very inviting about this approach, and it’s a wonderful little insight I’m going to take with me.

Collapsing Narrative

The last bit of savvy in an already very well made book is how Cai collapsed the stories of her great-grand mother and her grandfather into one narrative timeline. Images from both funerals appear side by side with no clear demarcation, disorienting your sense of what occurred when. By combining both the funerals Cai describes the generality of the funeral process whilst avoiding repetition, without ever losing a sense of the personal connection to the events depicted. Even more than that, a willingness to merge the stories of two deeply loved family members keeps the book from ever feeling sentimental.

Minnan Exit stood out for all these reasons, and of course a lot more. If you’re interested, you can grab a copy here.

Cheers,

Chris