Photo Book: Forgottonia: The Audience

Project: Forgottonia: The Audience - Photography Book

Printer: Edition One Books

Editon: 50 signed copies - 101 pages

8.5 x 11 inches soft bound with paper cover

Introduction by Paul Berlanga - Berlanga FineArt/Photographs

Details: Second in a trilogy of books by Bruce Morton documenting his childhood home of Bowen, Illinois which is part of a section of Illinois called Forgottonia. I did the photo editing, design and layout and we worked together on the final sequence and made a few proofs before the final edition of 50.

Introduction by Bruce Morton:

My exploration of Forgottonia continues with this second book of photographs that further investigates the community of people who live, love, work, and die here. The Forgottonia social calendar includes school activities, auctions, holiday parades, various festivals, fairs and occasionally the circus.

This project was initiated several years ago. I was photographing a county fair and during one of the evening events, I started to study the audience. The more I looked at them, the more interesting I found them to be rather than the actual event that they were watching. I absorbed what the people in the crowd were wearing, took note of their body language and the food they were eating, and their reactions to each other and to what was happening in front of them. Like the director of a TV variety show, I found those brief moments of candid human emotions observed more interesting than the show. These moments define the past, present, and future of Forgottonia. -Bruce Morton