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Photography has been a passion of Lucy Cox’s for as long as she can remember. And making an Printique photo book proved to be an ideal, striking way to display her diverse portfolio of work. We sat down with Lucy to pick her brain about making her new album, “Serendipity.”
ADORAMAPIX: How did you get your start in photography?
LUCY: I was five years old when my parents bought me my first point-and-shoot film camera and a little canvas case to carry it around in. When you look at our old family photos, you can see clearly that the camera and I were always together. It’s been like that for my entire life. Now, I use a 1976 Olympus OM-2 that I got as a gift.
ADORAMAPIX: Why did you decide to make a photo album?
LUCY: My friends often look at my photos and say, “These are good — have you ever considered doing anything with them?” And I hadn’t, but I wanted to show off my artistic diversity, so I put together a portfolio of both digital and film, urban and rural, and portrait and landscape photos. Looking back, there’s a definite theme of unexpected juxtaposition going on: serendipity.
ADORAMAPIX: Tell us a little about some of the photos and their significance in your life.
LUCY: The first story is the one of how I got my camera, an Olympus OM-2, and it’s a sad story. The photo is of a decrepit building against a perfect blue sky in Anglesey, North Wales.
My friend Jack was killed in a climbing accident in Anglesey two years ago, and for some reason, my first reaction was to go and see where he spent his last few days. It was beautiful. Soon afterwards, his father gave me the Olympus OM-2 that he’d blown all his wages on back in 1976, and it was a gift that he’d meant to give to Jack. I’ve used and loved it ever since.
ADORAMAPIX: You can truly see the melancholy you were feeling in the stillness of the picture.
LUCY: Thank you — it was a hard time. The next one is a bit happier, though.
The three people in black and white are my sister, my mother, and my nephew on the beach in West Wales. Black-and-white film defies the ordinary British “holiday snap,” but I think this deviation somehow adds to the charm.
The four flower photos are all from Wales and taken very close up, which blurs everything that isn’t in the foreground, emphasizing the softness and greenery of the countryside. I have gotten into a habit of using a macro lens, even when I don’t necessarily need to. Apart from somewhat soft focusing at long distances, it has a mild telephoto effect — pulling things together that would otherwise be apart.
This page features all different aspects of London — a city of juxtapositions in itself! Page one has a picture of the Tower of London surrounded with a sea of beautiful red poppies, but with the ugliness of The Shard poking up in the background. This is the kind of decrepit beauty I look for in things that might otherwise be considered mundane or even ugly.
Then there’s a photo from watching the sunrise on my last day at boarding school — and all the emotions that go with it. Photography has always been a way for me to express what’s been going on in my mind, and I hope it always will be.
ADORAMAPIX: What was the process of creating your photo book like?
LUCY: It was fantastic! The site was so easy to use. I opted not to work with a template, and chose a 12” by 9” book in portrait orientation, which worked out well.
When it comes to importing and dragging your photos into the book, you have a lot of freedom to choose — you can crop, rotate, and overlay each individual photo, for example, to create a double-page spread that resembles Polaroid photos scattered across a desk. You could also line them up, large and precise, to showcase your work at its best.
Once all this is finished and you’re happy with each aspect of your photo book, you simply order it like you would on any online store. The delivery estimate was up to three weeks because I live in the U.K., but I was pleasantly surprised when it turned up within ten days!
ADORAMAPIX: And how did it look?
LUCY: Well, the first thing that struck me was the reassuring sturdiness of the product. The heavy, glossy pages are also pleasing to the eye and to the touch, and the weight of the paper allows the book to lie flat, which I really liked for my full-size, two page photos.
Overall, it was just really exciting to see that the photography that meant so much to me could be showcased in such a beautiful way to everyone in my life. And that was the best part of all.
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