July 2012

When I first started high school, I began keeping a handwritten journal. It was one of those ‘dear diary’ ones, and it was filled with all my emotional angst from those early years of being a teenager. That lasted about a year. In my early twenties, I started journalling again. This time on my computer. Day in, day out, I logged my daily activities as well as bits and pieces of conversations with friends. It read a bit like a news report, except that it was not all that interesting a read. When Cameron died five years ago, I took to journalling by hand again. Every day, as I sat by our bedroom window, forlorn, empty, heart-broken and grief-stricken, I would pour my heart out into a beautiful green leather notebook. Writing in that notebook kept me sane and allowed me to get through each day. A lot of that writing I put online onto Cameron’s website, for family and friends to read.

Last year, on my thirty-first birthday, I decided to start a journal again. But I wanted to do something different this time. I wanted it to be more about images rather than words. And I wanted it to be something that was just for me, as opposed to something for the family or the children. A personal, visual journal of sorts.

The first thing I did was to find a notebook that would suit the purpose. I wanted something that was about A5 in size (ie. smaller than all the children’s scrapbooks), that used recycled paper, that had a leather cover and that was hand-bound. I didn’t want something that was sold to the mass market, so I turned to Etsy for my online search. The result was this beautiful white journal from the shop badgerandchirp. The best part was that I could specify the exact size I wanted as well as the number of pages to go into the notebook. Perfect.

In the beginning, I filled a couple of pages with words despite the visual direction that I wanted to take. I wrote about my birthday, and I wrote down all the negative emotions I was feeling one particular day. It was helpful for me to see at a glance everything that I was struggling with, because all of a sudden, life didn’t seem too big or too overwhelming once it was down on paper.

But thereafter, I began filling the pages with photos like I intended. To keep a somewhat consistent style, I only selected photos that had been processed with my CrossProcess iPhone app. Whereas my criteria for the boys’ scrapbooks were to choose photos that depicted a special moment for the child, my photo-selection method for this personal journal was to only choose my favourite photos throughout the year. This was a much narrower criteria and the reason for it was because I wanted the journal to be a personal memoir of my favourite moments. I didn’t need it to be comprehensive like the boys’ scrapbooks. The purpose was not to record everything, but to highlight and pay tribute to the events or the moments in time that were especially meaningful to me.

I think this is one of the most useful things to do when it comes to journalling or memory-keeping: work out what you want the particular scrapbook, journal or photo album to achieve (in other words, what is its purpose?) and then lay down a set of criteria (or boundaries) which you then use to create the content. For me, this is the key to starting, maintaining and finishing something.

Again, I chose to keep the content and aesthetic as simple as possible. Here’s an overview of my process:

• I selected the photos I wanted in Aperture and printed them 8 to an A4 page.
• I used a black felt tip pen for writing and no embellishments at all.
• For each page, I chose either a single standalone photo or a small ‘set’ of photos that went together.
• I started each new photo (or new set of photos) on the right hand page.
• I always wrote down the corresponding date, because I know the future me would want to be able to see immediately when the photos were taken.
• I gave each photo or set of photos a simple title – just enough to ‘complete’ the photo or photos.
• For single photos, I centred it on the page. The title would then go above it, and the date below it.
• For each set of four photos, I used a simple 2×2 layout. Again, the title would go above, and the date below.
• Where a set contained three photos, I would adopt the same 2×2 layout, except leave one of the photo spaces empty. I would then centre the title in that empty space. The date would then go below the photos. (See last photo above.)
• If there were potentially two photos to go onto a page, I would only choose one because I feel that a single photo is much more effective than two.
• Where there were more than four photos, I would use a combination of the above layouts, except the title would go above the photo(s) on the first page, and the date would go below the photo(s) on the last page. (See photos below.)

I think that this is the sort of visual journal that anybody could undertake. You can start whenever you want. You can update it as frequently as you want (I did half a year’s worth in one go). You can adopt an even narrower criteria than I have and therefore include even less photos than me. You can add embellishments if you wish. You can easily add more text.

Do you keep a personal journal of sorts (or done so in the past)?