One copy, read and sequenced by a designer, printed on photographic paper and bound by hand — with nothing written on the cover and nothing on the spine.
Between these covers is an hour that belongs to nobody else: the way the light found you, what you were feeling when the shutter went, the version of you he is the only one ever shown. Pressed flat between two boards, and closed. A gallery has no covers. This does, and the closing is half of what it means.
It says the thing that is difficult to say out loud — that you are his, and that you thought it was worth putting somewhere permanent. He is not told it. He turns the pages and arrives at it himself, which is the only way that sentence has ever landed.
A gallery link is opened once, on a phone, for about forty seconds, and then a notification arrives. A book is handed over in a room, with both hands, and it takes as long as it takes. When he reaches the end he has to decide where to put it — a drawer, a shelf, the case he is packing — and that decision is the part people underestimate.
It is also the only version of these photographs that is not a file. Files get copied, forwarded, synced to an account neither of you controls and left on a phone that gets replaced. A bound album can be none of those things. That is not a limitation of the object. It is the point of it.
And it need not be for a man at all. Some of these books are made by a woman for herself, and they are bound exactly the same way.
This is usually the question that decides it, so it gets the longest section on the page rather than a line of reassurance. Almost none of it is special treatment invented for this album — it is what our privacy notice already says. Here it is as much of what you are buying as the binding is.
The one thing we cannot delete is the sales record, which tax law requires us to keep, and which holds an amount and an address rather than a photograph.
And if a signature would help, we will sign a non-disclosure agreement — yours or ours, before you upload anything. We have done it many times, for people whose faces and voices you would recognise, and nobody here will ask you why you are asking.
Everything here is decided by the fact that this album will be handled — picked up, opened, closed quickly, put back.
Fifty-three cover materials are available and here we will point you at the quiet end of all of them. By default we press nothing into the cover at all. If you want something there, a blind deboss is the right answer: pressed into the material with no colour in it, so it is legible when the book is tilted to the light and invisible the rest of the time. Two initials and a date read as bookbinding. A name and a word describing what is inside do not, and we would talk you out of it.
We will not put a cameo window on this album. It is an option on every other book we make and we like it on all of them, but a cameo window is a photograph on the outside of a cover.
It arrives in a clamshell box, in the same material as the cover if you want it matched. The box is not packaging. It is what makes this a book that gets put away rather than left out.
The photographs are the same in all three. What changes is how permanent the sequence is, and how much of the making you keep in your own hands.
The lay-flat album. We print it and hand-bind it, and the pages open completely flat, with the micro-fold at the spine running between the photographs rather than through a face. The sequence is fixed for good, which is the whole appeal: it is a book, and a book has an order.
Take the prints and slide them into the mount openings yourself. One photograph to a page, nothing else on the spread, and no file of yours ever needs to reach a press: you can have the prints made and place them in the book at home. Add to it later, or take one out.
The smallest of the three, and the most discreet. A handful of photographs in a hand-bound cover that closes over them, small enough to hold in one hand and to keep somewhere that is not a shelf. The right answer when the sitting produced six photographs worth having rather than sixty.
A curator opens the whole set and reads it in the order it happened: the first frames where nobody is comfortable yet, the middle where the camera stops mattering, the quiet ones at the end. What he opens has a beginning and an end, rather than being a shortlist of the most flattering frames.
We correct colour and exposure, and we take out the things that were never meant to be in the picture — a plug socket, a hotel label, a crease in the backdrop. We do not slim, smooth or reshape anybody, and we will not do it if you ask. There are studios that will. The whole value of this book is that it is a record of one real morning, given to the one person who already knows exactly what you look like.
Send the sitting as it was delivered rather than a shortlist, because pre-selecting removes the material a curator needs. Anything you never want a stranger to see, delete it in the gallery before you tell us to begin: what you take out is gone, and the curator never has it. You see every spread before anything is printed, and revisions are unlimited and free.
Anniversaries and birthdays are the obvious ones. The wedding morning is the version people picture first, and it is the one we would argue with: a room half full of groomsmen is the worst possible audience for a private book. Give it the night before, or leave it in the case to be found later. Then there is no occasion at all, which is the one we would choose, because a book handed over in the middle of February cannot be mistaken for an obligation.
From the day the photographs reach us, allow three to four weeks: three to five working days for the design, a week or so of changes at your pace, then ten working days for printing and binding. If the sitting has not happened yet, allow six weeks in total and you will not be counting days. If the date cannot move, say so when you upload — rush production exists, and we will tell you honestly whether it is achievable rather than take the order and hope.
Leave an email and a private upload link arrives within minutes. Upload the sitting yourself, or forward the link to your photographer. A curator reads every frame and a designer lays out every spread, and your album comes back as a private link within three to five working days. Change whatever you like, as often as you like. Approve it, and only then does anything cost money — printed, hand-bound, boxed and shipped within ten working days.
The curation and the design cost nothing, however many rounds it takes, and there is no deposit and no card on file. You have the figure in writing before anything is printed, and if the finished book is not what you hoped for, send it back and we refund it in full — nothing about the subject matter makes us awkward about that. The whole process is set out step by step on the How it works page.
A private online gallery for your photographs, and a designed album to page through. Leave your email and we will send you a single upload link — your design follows in three to five working days.
