The height the river and the street

I was 12 years old and we were seeing the sights of London with my family. My mom wanted us to have a fun and informative trip, so we decided

to visit the Tower of London as well. I am scared of heights and have been for many years but my mom has made it her own little mission to get me cured of it.

So we went all the way up in the tower. At the top is a bridge between the two towers. The walls are made of glass and I remember the floor being too. But now looking at pictures, it couldn’t be. It was just what it looked like to me, like a gap of nothing-ness. You have to cross it to get out from the other side. This was what my mom had in mind.

I was standing on one end, the most terrified that I had ever been. And she calmly walked across the bridge, when I yelled that I couldnt do it. She said I had to, it would be good for me, concur my fear once and for all. She wouldn’t walk with me, said it was something I had to do myself.

You look at the walls and you saw the outside, the height, the street, the river, the whole world. It felt like there was nothing but air, like you were walking on air with nothing to hold onto. I tried to hold onto the rails and closed my eyes and slide myself slowly onto the other side of the bridge.

EXPERIMENTS coupled with the reading of what Stina had written about her place immediately started me off with exageration. Seeing as Stina’s memories were all about fear i was kean to recreate this feeling of heightened drama, and of experience and occasion. Chopping up my photograph as well as working with inverted colours got me exploring and twisting and morphing Tower bridge into something that could potentially recreate the scariness that i picked up in Stina’s writing.

MOVEMENT has been a bit of a re-occurance this term and as i began warping my photogaph of tower bridge it reminded me quite quickly of the channel 4 adverts, i moved the pieces of the bridge around a page and began photogaphing it in various positions, this helped me to understand the various parts of the bridge and got me thinking about how they could be reconstructed to elevate this illusion of fear and large scale in comparison to the viewer.

DEVELOPMENT after experimenting with the bridge as segments led me to using larger pieces of Tower bridge as opposed to small ones. Seeing as the brief was for a 2D piece and not a 3D moving image i used larger parts of the bridge as they were easier to slot together and kept a continual and linear feel, but it also worked better with the idea of scale, keeping everything feeling bigger and longer than it actually was. This particularly applied to Stina’s description of the pathway she had to cross as very long.

FRANZ KAFKA book covers were aninspiration to my design as i found their twistedappearance encompassed the feeling of memories, and moved them slightly into a dream like state. They prompted me to keep my design black and white as i felt this was a better way to represent past memories, expecially child hood memories. Although the image content was different, the visuals of exagerated faces fell directly in with what i was trying to do- morphing the normal into the surreal and frightening. I looked at these Kafka book covers and attempted to recreate some of thefeelings using my developed imagery of the bridge.

The height the river and the street

THE PLACEMENT of text proved difficult for me. I looked at placing it along some of the bridge as well as leaving the bridge as a background image and layering large type over the top. However i rejected this as i wanted the image to be the image and the text to simply be the text. Fusing the words and images too much began tainting the image, and taking away from its impact as the focal point of the design. I also opted in the end to use small type for the same reason. At points i considered having no text, though i quite liked the severity it created visu-ally i didn’t want to leave the viewer totallyunassisted in the understanding of the cover.

The height the river and the street

I was standing on one end, the most terrified that I had ever been. And she calmly walked across the bridge, when I yelled that I couldnt do it. She said I had to, it would be good for me, concur my fear once and for all. She wouldn’t walk with me, said it was something I had to do myself.

The height the river and the street

The initial images on this page came before the elongated bridge sections on the opposite page. I ultimately opted to reject these darker images on reflection that i wanted the cover to depict the sense of a journey, making it more linear i felt did this.

The height the river and the street