Louise Hawson

Dear 52 Suburbs Around the World blog followers

When I asked you whether or not you would pre-order a 52 Suburbs Around the World book via a crowd funding site like this one, the resounding answer was YEAH!

It was wonderful to hear and ever since I've been head down slaving over the processing of hundreds of images as well as obsessing about the design of the book. With the book now 99% of the way there it's time to see if we can make this happen.

First up, a reminder of what the book will be...

THE DETAILS

• Largish without being too large - 260mm x 240mm – which will allow the images to really sing
• Hard cover
• Around 360-380 pages with more than 600 colour photos – ie chunky!
• Weight - 2 kg (includes packaging)

As I said on the blog a month ago, I set out to make this book beautiful and joyous, fun and full of heart – to reflect the project itself. And by George I think I've done it!

So what can you expect?

Hundreds and hundreds of the images that you enjoyed on the blog, as well as edited blog entry text (edited down from 70,000 words to around 20,000!).

The images in the book are a mix of diptychs as well as single page images as per the following examples of spreads from the book:


























I've also included a smattering of hand-written notes and drawings from Coco and I, taken from our travel journals - like Coco's drawing below, in Rome.









There's also a ‘behind the scenes’ aspect to this book that wasn’t in my first book and nor in the blog, to give you more insight into what happened in the moments leading up to various shots as well as my photographic 'process' and how I go about approaching the hundreds of people I photographed for the project – like the amazing woman in Istanbul with the green eyes below.

This is the double-page spread...






And this is the left-hand side close-up...




SOME MORE EXAMPLES

While these sample spreads may change slightly, they should give you a good idea of what you can expect when you receive your book in the post and sit down with a fine cup of tea/glass of vino to relive our year long adventure together.

Just try and imagine the spreads being much much bigger though - 260mm wide to be exact!

I want to keep the cover a surprise but here are a few more random spreads...












To help you orient yourself, each new city is introduced with a spread showing you where the various suburbs are on the city map.








WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE MORE?

Here's what you need to do...

CLICK ON THE BUTTON TO YOUR RIGHT - and help make this book a reality.

To make sure the book sees the light of day and ends up in your hands, I need to raise the funds required - $20,000. This will cover scans, pre-press and printing (and the 5% Pozible charge).

While the actual book costs $79, I've added postage (only within Australia) to make life easier - so the total comes to $95, including postage anywhere within Australia.

(As much as I'd love anyone living elsewhere to be involved, the postage of a 2kg book from Australia is excessive. But please stay tuned - if the book is published, I hope to find a more cost-effective solution.)

So that means we need a total of 215 books to be pre-ordered - because as you may know, the way crowd funding works is that if you don't raise the full amount (ie $20,000 in this case) you don't receive a single penny.

I've set the length of the campaign to two weeks - a little shorter than usual because I want to get this moving. If the campaign is successful, the book will go to print immediately and be delivered to you late August or early September (yes, books take that long to be printed).

We can do this - I have faith!

Once again, many MANY thanks to you all.

Louise and Coco xx

www.52suburbs.com