Alone / Together Book

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“Alone / Together” is a two-part publication exploring the complexities

of our interpretations and relationships with the words through the eyes of

57 anonymous participants.

The written contents of this book were collected anonymously from 57 individuals. Over three days, a Google Form was released to the public, asking participants to answer a series of questions. I went into this project wanting to explore the words ‘alone’ and ‘together’, wanting to understand the depth of their meaning and just how differently they can be interpreted. The form I released was meant to act as inspiration for this, but instead, I found it to contain an abundance of insightful and challenging ideas and translations. After reviewing the answers provided, I decided to use these responses as the focus and primary content of my publication. 57 participants completed the form.

Of these 57, 41 were aged between 15-25, 4 aged between 25-35, 1 aged between 35-45, and 11 aged 45 and over. 42 identified as female, 13 as male, 1 as nonbinary, and 1 as transgender. Of the 57, 56 resided within Victoria, with 1 participant responding to the form from Queensland.

I chose to hand bind the publication as I wanted to visually both separate and join the two parts of the publication while challenging my binding abilities by creating a dos-e-dos book. I chose to dos-e-dos Coptic stitching the two parts, keeping the binding of the publication bare of embellishments; beyond a title embossed into the card cover. The neutral appearance was intentional so as to not accidentally sway the reader’s perception of either word to be more negative or positive through the use of colours. The neutral covers also create a lovely contrast with the colourful imagery within.

I curated the images in the publications to fit within a specific aesthetic to keep the publications consistent. The images are primarily red or blue-toned, with several black and white images sprinkled within. I used photographs from some of my favourite photographers to help visualise the themes and ideas presented through the participant’s responses. These images are all highly emotive and depict the many definitions and perceptions of the words “alone” and “together”.

Because of the nature of the written content of this book, no editing was completed to the responses besides spelling corrections; no grammatical changes were made. I chose to do this to maintain the integrity of the individual author’s responses and to keep each author’s voice within their answers. In more relaxed environments, I find we often type in the same way we speak, and so keeping the format of the responses as was submitted was important.