Fun With Photos--and Photoshop!

I spent the week-end taking photos for possible cover art for my upcoming chapbook. First, to refresh your memory, here's my title poem, which was first published in Poetry East and is about the modern work life in an office, a kind of drudgery that is similar, yet different, to that experienced by housewives of several generations ago. The title is a deliberate nod to Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing."

I Stand Here Shredding Documents


I stand here shredding documents.
I think of my mother and her basket
of ironing, the baskets of clothes,
both clean and dirty, the constants
of laundry and housekeeping.

I yearned for a different set of baskets,
an inbox and an outbox,
clothes that need professional attention
from dry cleaners and a house
so uninhabited
that it didn't get dirty.

Now I have become my father,
a woman of file cabinets
and endless meetings of infinite boredom.
I stand at the shredder,
my daily friend, and think of work
that is never finished.

Here I tried to include lots of elements, and I love that the rolodex is open to the state of South Carolina Retirement System contact info.

The poems throughout the book talk about women's work of all kinds, and so I tried to create art that matched the subject.

Above, a scaled down approach: shreds as nest.

I had lots of fun with pairs of bronzed baby shoes (I have 2 pairs, one of which was my mom's, and one my spouse's).

My spouse got into the fun too.

And here, above my first attempt at combining photos in Photoshop, which is a new program to me. I didn't do any of the arty things I could have done, like shading, blurring, and all the numerous effects I could have done within each photo itself. I'll keep playing with photos and images I've found and later this week, I'll ask you what you think makes the most effective cover art.