Book Design—Look Up

In Look Up, the goal of the book was to create awareness for political prisoners and to point out the things in life that should be free to human beings that are often taken for granted. With this in mind, photos of the sky were taken every time I left my house over the period of one week. The dates and times were recorded for each photo. The photos were then organized in a book, one photo per page, with the width of the photos proportionally shrinking until there was only a sliver of sky left. Then the sliver disappeared, leaving only a blank page. The shrinking photos represent the closing of a door, or jail cell. On the inside back cover of the book an envelope was attacked containing a card with the name of a political prisoner currently in detention. The card was purposefully put in the back of the book to follow the “closing door” sky photos, as if the prisoner was the only thing left in the cell surrounded by emptiness. The entire book was sealed in a plastic bag and buried under dirt in a box. This makes the viewer work to uncover the ugly truths that humans usually ignore. The box is labeled with the coordinates of the city where the political prisoner was arrested. In this case a city in China.

The book is a metaphor for life. The exploration of the book forces people to get dirty and work to understand and remember the plight of political prisoners.