The Mysterious Affair at Styles

During my second year of studying photography at college I started a coursework project inspired by a variety of books. Anyone who knows me would hardly be surprised that Agatha Christie's Poirot was the subject of one of the photoshoots for that project. The book in question was The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Agatha Christie's debut novel and Hercule Poirot's first introduction to the world.

 

This particular piece came about entirely by accident. I tried out a variety of different shots for this photoshoot and it was only when I started editing in Photoshop that I realised this image had the makings of a book cover. I continued experimenting with this image throughout the whole lesson that morning and then continued working on it throughout the next photography lesson.

 

The mug here was intended to refer to the cups mentioned by Poirot in the book and the small jar was intended to represent strychnine, which was used in the murder depicted in the book. I added some quotes from Poirot and Hastings about the coffee cups and, after several different ideas, I settled on the placement of the text within the shadow of the mug. The biggest challenge for me was choosing a font style for Agatha Christie's name and I must confess I was not particularly pleased with my choice at the time. I should add that my opinion on the font style remains the same because I feel it is too jarring in comparison to the title font, which seems to work rather well.

Done