You Can Keep Tomorrow

Client: Photographer Ester Grass Vergara

Brief: Create a book design for the project You Can Keep Tomorrow of photographer Ester Grass Vergara in order to graduate from the Royal Academy of Art (KABK), the Hague.

Deliverables: Photography book design

Website: estergrass.com

Photographer Ester Grass Vergara approached Wunderwald to design a photography book for her graduation from the Royal Academy of Art (KABK), the Hague. Her project was called ‘You Can Keep Tomorrow’.

For the photography book of 92 pages, we decided on a hard cover design with black linen binding. The cover image is quite striking for Grass Vergara’s work as the face of the girl stays hidden. We don’t quite know what is going on but to us, this girl feels to impersonate what Grass Vergara calls “the beautiful side of being ‘stuck’ in limbo where time is of no essence.” In close collaboration with the photographer, we selected the images for the book and created a coherent storyline. The last image of the book is related to the cover image, as this is again a photograph of a girl with her face hidden. This makes the photobook a coherent experience, as these images mirror each other.

The last part of the book consists of a short story written by Isabel Serval. We decided to print the story on a different type of uncoated paper than used for the photographs. This creates a delicate transition between the pictures and the story in the book.

Ester Grass Vergara says about You Can Keep Tomorrow: “The project, which resulted into a book, is inspired by my fears of growing up which comes hand in hand with responsibilities. The work I made for this project is of a symbolic nature and whilst creating the images I drew great inspiration from classic stories like Barrie’s Peter Pan, Nabokov’s Lolita, Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland but also the Holy Bible and my own experiences and views on growing up and eventually growing old.”

“You could say I suffer from the Peter Pan Syndrome. You Can Keep Tomorrow shows that there is nothing wrong with lingering a little longer before you make the jump between now and tomorrow. It shows the beautiful side of being ‘stuck’ in this limbo where time is of no essence.” {…} “Growing up is never easy. Trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts.”