Field Studies By Chrystel Lebas

Lebas’ photobook grabs the viewers attention with the natural look of the cover. The feel of the book is textured to match the theme of fields and nature and the brown covering like cardboard makes it feel as though its been handmade. the spine of the book has ‘Chrystal Lebas, Field Studies’ in black text on a cream bump textured covering. The photobook is heavy and A4 demonstrating the amount of pages and photos that are within. The cardboard texture of the book carries on around to the back page with just the spine to separate the front and back.

The front cover has the title again in the top left corner and a dated looking black and white image to the side of it with text that reads ‘Walking through Landscapes and Archives’ under it. This suggests to the viewer that there also may be hints of history within the book. Lebas’ name is also repeated on the front cover to the left and on the bottom of the page there is a coloured image of a forest that takes half of the page up showing its importance as it gives the viewer a look into what the book will contain. On the back of the book There is no writing but instead a single photo of a stem which branches off into 8 different shaped and sized leaves. This is a silhouette example of a plant so it is a black figure filling the centre of the A4 page.

Within the book, the first page copies the front cover texture and contains a contents page of the book. this would suggest that there is a lot of information enough to need a contents page. The pages of the book are thick and good quality making the book feel more expensive and strong. The book begins with pages of writing to introduce the artist and their work. Throughout the book the colour themes of blue and green a very commonly used as photos of the sea and forests are captured frequently.

The first page that has a phot in the book shows a contrast of images where the photographer has captured a shot at low tide and then a shot at high tide. The image of low tide shows the long distance of sand and seaweed that travels along the beach until it reaches the shore and buildings and hills can be seen. The lighting of this image is fairly dark as the photo has been taken at the end of the day. Th blue tint from the sky gives the image a cool effect that could almost make the viewer experience a brush of a cold feeling as they view the image. In the contrasting image, the tide is high which covers the seabed and the seaweed. The sky in this image is more over casted then the first image as it contains many dark clouds making this image darker to the other. When reading the writing at the bottom of the page, you can notice that the photographer has included the date of publication where the first image reads August 2012 (low tide) and the second image reads December 2013 (high tide). this shows that the photographer didn’t intend to create the contrast when she took the first image as the next time she returned to take the next image was a year later.