Why the Book Has Audio and Video in It

Come Get Your Honey holds two QR codes. One opens a voice recording, the other a video. People sometimes flag this as a gimmick before they scan, and change their mind after. The multimedia was not in the original plan for the book. It exists because of a single question.

Marianne’s question

Marianne Ager, Curator for Photography and Film at Kunstmuseum Brandts, wrote the outro for the book. While we were working on it she asked me, almost in passing, whether I had video of the people in the photographs.

I said no.

The question stayed with me in the way unanswered questions do. Photography flattens people into a fraction of a second, and I had spent three years insisting that the work was about listening — yet the book, as planned, was silent. The people in it have voices, accents, laughter, ways of pausing. A portrait cannot carry any of that. A recording can.

So the book grew two doors. Behind one, a voice. Behind the other, moving images. Neither replaces the photographs; they sit underneath them, the way a well in a courtyard does not replace the courtyard.

A small universe

From early on I wanted the book to be a self-contained world rather than a portfolio — an introduction, an outro, an interview by Prince Emrah, essays by Amrou Al-Kadhi and Marianne Ager, and the two QR codes. Something you enter, move through at your own pace, and leave changed by, rather than a sequence of my best frames.

A printed book is portable and finite. Unlike a feed, it does not refresh, and it does not disappear. Adding audio and video could easily have broken that finiteness, turning the object into a landing page. The QR codes work because they are quiet: two small marks that wait until a reader is curious enough to ask the book a question. Which is, in the end, the same thing Marianne did to me.

The book is published by Kehrer Verlag; the series it holds is here.