Belles Lettres

To Whom It May Concern,
Anyone interested in this? I'm thinking of making a zine for one of my design classes called Belles Lettres involving letter writing--kind of a spin-off of that Letters I Never Sent idea I had a few months ago. I've been really interested in the ways letters look, especially old ones and was thinking of putting something together that combines some really cool pictures of letters. I also need to interview people about their letter writing experiences and take pictures of their letters (all anonymous of course). Would anyone be interested in helping me with this?

Forever Your Most Humble Servant,
Bebe Gun


Here's my proposal for my teacher:
My project will address the issue of letter writing, and specifically the visual nature of it. My format will be a ‘zine exploring how people visually express themselves when writing letters. It will be a parallel study between the visual nature of the letters and my interviewees personal connection with letter making. My main question here is: “How is letter writing a unique form of communication in comparison with speaking, or any other form of communication?”
My assumption is that letter writing as a form of expression has become more obsolete since the advent of the Internet and e-mailing, and I’m hoping to research more about people’s relationships to letters they have written in the past, if they still write letters, ways they have adorned their letters, and if they store their letters as special keepsakes—basically, what their relationships to their old letters are.
I plan to interview a wide range of people about their personal experiences with writing letters, receiving letters, saving them as keepsakes, etc. I also plan on taking a lot of photos of letters to convey their unique visual nature.