Hi friends!

Big life update: I just quit my job to make an art book!!

The book, which I'm calling Pairwise, is a collection of photos arranged in pairs. I pair the photos based on their visual resemblance, and then join them together with short texts which blend narrative nonfiction and personal history.

You’re receiving this email because you signed up in 2022 (can you believe it’s been four years?!? 😱) to follow along as I wrote a short story called Life Story.

This email is a one-time announcement about my latest project, which you can follow along via a new email newsletter all about Pairwise.

In the fall of 2023, just six months after finishing Life Story, I shared a note with the seed of what would eventually become Pairwise — though at the time I had no idea this was where it would lead me.

In Life Story, the character Mariam is obsessed with finding patterns. She spends hours on her computer exploring an abstract black-and-white grid world: searching, searching.

In Pairwise, I’m the one searching. I’m still working within constraints, but I’m out of the black-and-white world of the Game of Life, and into technicolor life itself.

I’m working with a collection of 45,000 pictures: all the photos I took on my phone between roughly 2010 and 2024. Within that collection of images, I’m searching for pairs of pictures whose similarity surprises me because I took them at different times in different places and showing different subjects.

Here's one such pair.

My plan over the coming months is to finish selecting images, researching, and writing, and then to work with a printer and binder to turn this project into something you can hold in your hands. I’m starting with a booklet featuring the first set of images and texts. I’ll be producing the booklet in a limited preview edition of 100 copies, shipping in time for the holidays. The full-length book will follow in 2027.

As I was writing Life Story, I took pleasure in creating an immersive world around the story. The interactive Game of Life simulations which I interleaved with the text when I published the story were part of that. It was there in the newsletter, too, in the little patterns that I used as section dividers, and the animated frieze at the top and bottom of every edition (including this one!) — all real artifacts from the world of the story. Expect the same level of craft and attention to detail with Pairwise!

If you want to look over my shoulder as I sort through images, visit archives, pick out paper, and watch freshly-printed pages pour out of the printer, the best way to follow along is by subscribing to the newsletter I’ve set up for this project.

Thank you for supporting my creative work over the years! Your encouragement means the world as I jump into this full-time.

Justin