From Where They Came — Stanley/Barker
editorial design
From Where They Came is a book of photographs featuring images taken by Katherine Turczan in Ukraine, starting in 1991, at the dawn of independence. As the daughter of American immigrants searching for her identity, she captured her family who remained there using her 8×10 camera. Stanley/Barker editions (London) entrusted us with The graphic design of the book.
We designed a specific lettering for the title of the book and for the author's name. With their letters of very classical proportions, they aim to give a certain solemnity to the work. The numerous ligatures used and the assumed hesitations and vibrations, on the other hand, confer a certain humanity to the composition.
Katherine's first trip to Ukraine coincided with the coup d'état in Moscow in August and the new independence of Ukraine. There, a rediscovered family welcomed her: uncles, aunts, cousins, people she had only heard about.
On the back of the book, the ISBN adopts the typical graphic form of the Russian postcode system. We designed its shape based on images of envelopes from the author's family correspondences.
The first interior spreads feature the title of the book in its Ukrainian translation. We designed a specific Cyrillic lettering, capturing the qualities of the cover alphabet.
For months at a time, year after year, Katherine's rediscovered family gave her places to stay, fed her, offered rides to locations, and often assisted her while she built my ongoing collection of portraits.
