A book based on a journey, part 1

As soon as I read the brief - “a book based on the theme of a journey” - an idea popped into my head: my journey would be my journey to work. It's a journey I make five days a week, and that I make in reverse five days a week. I know it well, yet every time it's different. On the surface it's utterly banal as a subject, but I wanted to show the depth to this journey; I wanted to show its variety and possibilities, which are only created through its repetition.

Of course, I'm also wary of ideas that leap fully formed into my mind. I put it to one side and forced myself to come up with some other ideas. They are, (in the order that I came up with them):

• a salmon returning to spawn – it's an interesting journey, but I don't think I feel very compelled to write about fish.

• Scott's Antarctic Expedition – I imagined the images becoming increasingly obscured by snow until the final page, which would be completely white.

• a journey into space! – this caught my attention for a long time. I thought about basing this on the fake mission to Mars currently being run by the Russian Institute for Medical and Biological Problems. The six-man crew is spending 250 days in a fake spacecraft, 30 days exploring a fake Martian landscape, and then another 240 days in the fake spacecraft flying home. This 520 day project is intended to reveal to scientists the psychological effects of such a prolonged period of isolation so they can ensure the success of a manned mission to Mars in the future. Read more about it here. While I still love the idea of a fake journey I was very unsure about the form this book would take.

I kept coming back to the original idea and so I decided to flesh it out a bit more. As I wanted this to be all about the repetition of the journey, I envisioned having the same journey repeated five times (for the five weekdays), but each time have a different interruption to the journey. An interruption being something unique to that journey, such as a new piece of art, witnessing a fight or a new shop opening. The regular journey would be black and white, but the interruptions would be colourful and possibly larger than the rest of the book, requiring folding out to see them in full.

I started by breaking down my journey into 10 stages, intending to have these 10 stages as 10 pages that remained identical. I would then have five “interruption” spreads, and each time one of these would be inserted at random. However, five spreads would only give me four spaces to put my interruptions. I'd need 12 stages to the journey to get the five interruptions that I wanted. So, the journey would be 12 pages long, plus a two page interruption, and it would repeat five times. This is when I realised that 14 pages multiplied by five is 70, and suddenly this seemed like a very big book.

I decided to do two things: first, take a series of photographs of my journey to work and second, rethink the layout to create something more manageable.