Like many good things Musée begins with a story.
In fact it begins with three stories, and the real magic is how they weave together…
The first begins several years ago with a traveller on a bus in Spain, who strikes up a conversation with the woman sitting next to him. They like each other enough to introduce themselves.
He’s a wedding photographer from the far side of the world, in Spain on a scholarship.
She’s a paper conservator living in England, home to visit her family in Barcelona – and as it turns out, later, in love.
The photographer and the conservator like each other enough to swap email addresses … and that’s it.
Until one day five years later the photographer gets an email.
Virginia is to marry Richard, her Irish lover, in the Salo de Cent in Barcelona, and she wants him to photograph the event.
Every fibre in the photographer’s being wants to do this. The serendipity, the connection, Spain, the opportunity to shoot in a magnificent space.
He and his wife Jo travel to Barcelona, shoot the wedding, assemble a magical collection of images … and the photographer wonders what to do with them.
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But Johannes is not just an artist and storyteller, he’s also competitive. How to create something original to do justice to the Barcelona images is one thing, but another challenge is gnawing at him…
For the last two years he’s won the New Zealand Wedding Album of the Year award, and he wants to win again. He knows how good his colleagues are … he knows he’ll use Virginia and Richard’s Barcelona images … but … is that enough?
He picks up the phone and calls a friend.
Can you make me a very special album, he asks her?
I want something small and jewel-like, he says. I want it to feel precious and intimate, like the memories it contains. He cups his hands as he speaks … not that she can see … like those photos of the father holding his newborn.
I want it to be of leather. I want it to have that feeling of authority that the family Bible has.
I’d like it if the leather had laughter lines, like an old couch, as if it had absorbed the wisdom and memories and conversations of the people who had sat in it…
Is that possible?
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Conversations like this can be very awkward because they can so easily lead nowhere…
You’re not a sole craftsman, you’re creative director … so many demands. How much can you give to other people’s dreams? Do you really understand what’s in the other person’s head? Will they like what evolves in yours?
Can you even get the materials to realise their ideas?
But in this case Heather knew exactly what she would do.
She was already dreaming of a new album.
Strange perhaps that people can dream of albums, but really, no stranger than people who dream of wedding photography.
For years Queensberry had been building a system for designing beautiful custom albums, but now she wanted to do something that took her to a new level, something that took her back to her artisan roots.
She and her design team were already at work on a concept.
In fact Johannes’ album sounded like their album … and how fortunate to have his photographs for it.
She even had the brown vegetable tanned leathers in the studio. She’d bought them for her dream, but she knew they would age to fulfil his.
With a feeling of certainty she made the book and sent it to him just in time for the judging.
I saw it just before it shipped, and I was much less certain than Heather. Not because of the book – I thought the photography and the setting and the binding were beautiful – but because I did not know whether this was Johannes’ dream…
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But he loved it. He won.
He photographed the album, unfolding the elements to get to those intimate pages and the memories they will keep for generations. Then he made a slide show and set it to a song I thought was perfect.
We showed it to a few audiences, who loved it, and the tactile experience of the actual album, and I could tell Heather it was a success.
Virginia loved it too. Of course she did. She loved the images, but art and paper are her profession, as they are Richard’s – they’re both conservators, he at the Victoria and Albert, she at the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich – and she adored how they were presented.
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The postscript is another story, and as I write I don’t know how it ends…
Gino, one of our account managers, was talking to a Manhattan photographer whose work we’d featured on our new website.
You know my clients, he said. They want the very best, and they can afford it. I need something very special for them. What can you do?
When Gino called Heather about the conversation she was in the process of designing a second album, black this time. She wanted to fill it with beautiful black and white photography and she felt she’d found the perfect images … In fact she had the Manhattan photographer’s images on her screen when Gino called.
It was such serendipity that she called me in disbelief.
She doesn’t know whether Christian will like the album yet because he hasn’t seen it … but we think it looks stunning, and we hope he will.
Click here for Part 2
Best wishes, Ian
You can see Queensberry’s Musée albums pre-release at WPPI and FOCUS.
Please email me if you’d like us to advise when we release Musée on line.
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