PHOTOBOOK: CASIMIRO
Casimiro is a story about family ties, migrations, distances, and also about the love that moves human beings to care for those we care about by Evelyn Crende.
It is also Doublepage’s Opera Prima. And what a feeling, w-h-a-t a f-e-e-l-i-n-g!
One of the triggers that led us to create Doublepage was producing books, a shared dream, a desire that we both have been longing for some time.
And then came Casimiro: a set of intimate, simple, silent, respectful, heartfelt images that together asked and demanded to be put in a new order, on paper, page after page.
Evelyn approached us with a simple request: “This was a very meaningful project for me and I would like to have a book”. She added that we were “the right team” to develop it.
We smiled and started to work immediately. Cause let’s face it, we are a very hands on work team, patience is not our forte, the minute we have a project in hand, we just can’t stop thinking about it.
The following conversations revolved around the story, the photos available, the texts she had written and those we started to ask of her. We posed tons of questions, some of them quite uncomfortable, difficult to answer, some others felt like a delightful stroll at the snowed woods Evelyn was surrounded by at that moment. It was out of these exchanges that we could then decide which photos would be part of the book and which would not. The editing process can be approached from many different angles, for us is always a very organic process resulting of the authors proposal and intention combined with our personal and professional experiences as human beings, photographers, educators and, in design.
These were very emotional meetings that only the three of us will know of (and cherish), but we can tell you it was a very beautiful process. Just the way we like to work; we go deep, we bond, we feel and from there we start creating.
“The idea of the book was born from the workshop “1865” dictated by Roberto in his school in Caracas. We had to find a person who had 1865 days without seeing a loved one, and in complicity with them, create a box of photographic memories to give the other person as a gift.”
Casimiro was recently featured in Prodavinci, you can read it here.
A photbook is an object, it’s different from a photo that you hang on a wall. It has volume, it has a very particular smell and it can be read from start to finish or the other way around, it can be opened in different pages and therefore be experienced in many different ways. And because of that, every single decision in the design process is critical for how it will be perceived. We knew we wanted for the book not to be too big, it needed to feel intimate, something you could hold and hug comfortably.
We started with a full bled photo on the cover and ended with the cleanest cover of all, the focus is on the quality of the recycled paper, its color and the typography to highlight the beautiful title of this publication, this cover is a silent invitation, not a storefront. It needed to be soft, not rigid and the paper uncoated. We chose a binding that could be seen from the outside as a sign of honesty, and the color of the thread to contrast the cover in a discrete manner, just as Evelyn photographed the story.
We needed the book to feel simple, almost transparent, so the photos could do “the talking”. Every designer knows the complexity that entails, simple and special is not easy, but it is what we felt while browsing Evelyn’s work. There is a delicate gaze in it that needed to be honoured with the best materials and finishes without overpowering what the book is about: she discreetly photographed a story that we can all relate to and we selected the paper so you could feel that while browsing the pages.
Casimiro the book, was edited and sequenced simultaneously in Köln, Miami, Boston and Caracas. Printed and binded in Madrid, Spain in 2024.
We are deeply grateful to Evelyn Crende for her trust in Doublepage, believing that it could shape her discovery, the one that transcends the photographic. Thank you, Evelyn.
Many hours are dedicated to the sequence, the design, the texts, the colors used, defining a thread to bind it all, or the detail achieved while retouching one of the images so we can appreciate the details in the shadow. That's part of what it takes to make a book.
We want to do that at Doublepage, and we thank you Evelyn, for allowing us to honor Casimiro with our Opera Prima.
