Six years ago this month I went to St Petersburg, on a press trip. It was one of the best places I ever visited. I’d love to go back one day.
Mind you, it feels slightly transgressive to say that at the moment, what with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the mayhem it’s caused around the world.
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But that’s not the point of this post. The point is: to show how I gathered lots of material relating to the trip, and subsequently turned it into a handmade book – not for the publication that paid for the trip, but for myself.
The following images are just a tiny fragment of the hundreds of pictures I made, either with a camera or paper, pen and watercolours. Some other images included the person I travelled with, but I don’t need to share those here:
Afterwards, I gathered my favourite among all these images, along with various documents including the one at the top of this page, showing my name in Cyrillic letters.
I folded and tore a number of sheets of A4 paper into tiny booklets of eight pages, stuck in the images and added some verbal description. Then I stitched together all the tiny booklets, using Coptic stitch, and added a cover.
Ta-da!
