Card Games: Editing and Sequencing with Your Cards

Playing with Cards

On a screen you see one photograph at a time, in the order you shot them. A deck of small prints lets you see many at once, move them with your hands, put any two side by side, and undo it in a second.

Reference:

Alec Soth: playing cards
Gregory Halpern: cards
Deanna Templeton: wall editing

Before You Present: Make the Deck

Choose about 60 photographs that might go into the book. Include some maybes. A deck of only favorites has nothing to play against.
Make the cards with the Photo Card Maker. Print at actual size and cut along the dotted lines.
Keep the deck together with a rubber band or an envelope.
Write your blurb on an index card or a slip of paper and bring it.

Rule for every game: take a phone picture of the table before you move anything.

Solo Game (Do These Before Class)

Play these on your own, at home or during studio time. Bring the results (phone pictures and the cards themselves) to your day.

1. Three piles. Deal every card face up. Sort fast into in / maybe / out. Do not agonize. Put the out pile aside but do not throw it away.

2. Pairs. From the in and maybe piles, make at least five pairs: two cards side by side, like a spread in a book. A pair can work because the two pictures share something (content, shape, light, feeling) or because they pull against each other. Avoid pairs that only match (two red things, two dogs). Ask what the pair says that neither picture says alone.

3. Three in a row. Take your best pair and add a third card. Gregory Halpern describes a pair plus a third picture as the beginning of a phrase. Make two or three of these phrases.

4. Anchors. Pull the 3 to 5 cards the book cannot do without. These may not be your prettiest pictures. They are the ones that say what the project is.

5. First and last. Choose one card that opens the book and one that closes it. Try two different options for each.

6. Line. Lay out one row of 12 to 20 cards, left to right, from your first card to your last card. This is your anchoring sequence. Read it slowly, the way you would turn pages. Where does it speed up? Where does it stall?

Take photographs of each step.

In Class Game Option 1:

Each person gets about 25 minutes. Your deck is on the table and the whole class plays with it. Bring every card, including the out pile.

1. Spread . Spread the whole deck face up. Say nothing. Everyone looks.

2. Blind read. Before you say anything about the project, each classmate slides out the 3 cards they think are your anchors. Then show your own anchors. lets discuss where the picks match, the project is coming across. Where they do not...

3. Your turn . State/read your blurb. Lay out your anchoring sequence, your pairs, or both. Say what you are sure of and what you are not. (This is the result of the solo game)

4. Dominoes. Each classmate makes one pair from your deck that you did not make. State in one sentence why it works. Recall the Fulford exercise.

5. Someone else's edit (10 min). Two classmates take your deck and build their own row of 10, with a first and a last picture. You step back, stay quiet, and take notes. Do not explain and do not defend. Then they tell you what book they think they made.

6. Review/End Remember to photograph the table. Confirm what your blurb is again. (Did it change?)

In Class Game Option 2: (If your work has a inherent/conceptual/rigid rule)

For some of you, the work itself decides the order of the photographs: it is chronological, or serial, or follows some other rule. But that does not directly result in a book. You still have to decide somethings:

Selection. Which pictures are in. With a fixed order, editing is subtraction.
Start and stop. Where the sequence begins and where it ends.
The cut into spreads. Which two pictures face each other across the page.
Pacing. One picture per spread or two, blank pages, where text falls.
Exceptions. Whether the rule is ever broken, and where.

1. Baseline. Number the backs of your cards in rule order so you can always restore it. Lay out the whole deck in that order and photograph it.

2. Governing rule. Before you explain anything, classmates look at the table and say what they are ordered the way they are. If they cannot see it, the rule, maybe it needs to be made visible (dates, numbers, captions) somewhere, or it is not doing any work for the viewer.

3. Remove cards. Classmates remove cards without changing the order. How few cards still carry the work?

4. Rhthm . Pair the cards as spreads: 1 and 2, 3 and 4, and so on. Then shift by one card: 2 and 3, 4 and 5. Add blank cards into the mix. Change the rhythm. Which version is the book?

5. Consider an Exception. Break the rule exactly once. Where do you break it, and what does that do?

6. Shuffle test. Shuffle and deal a row at random. What happens?

7. If your work is serial (the same kind of picture, repeated) try laying the cards out as a grid instead of a line.