Max Friedman and Jamil McGinnis’ ‘Things You Know’ celebrates how no two stories are the same

Exploring themes of home, location and ephemerality, designer Max Friedman and filmmaker Jamil McGinnis joined forces in a two-year-long project that has concluded in a prolific publication consisting of over 200 pages of photographs, interviews and ephemera that Friedman and McGinnis have taken, recorded and collected. ‘Things You Know’ documents the Crown Heights area of Brooklyn, New York, focusing on this neighbourhood microcosm within which Friedman and McGinnis found a wonderful humanity.

“A few years ago we both moved to Crown Heights and started shooting a lot of photographs around the neighbourhood and meeting people with these incredible stories”, Friedman explains, “as we started to uncover the richness of every overflowing barbershop and street corner rants about “the old days”, we also became more and more intrigued by Crown Heights’ incredible culture and history”. Within the relatively small area of Crown Heights, there is a “tremendous juxtaposition of cultures and customs”, Friedman tells us, giving the example that a Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic Jewish community is found thriving directly alongside a Caribbean populace. After shooting the neighbourhood and collecting stories, the pair soon found themselves collating the book as a personal project, exploring their own practice alongside Crown Heights itself.

Intending to reference the experience of walking Crown Heights, no two spreads of the publication are the same, “just as no two blocks or interactions are the same”, Friedman recalls, commenting on the uniqueness of our own experiences. “That said”, he adds, “when every spread in a 250-page book is different, it requires a whole lot of typefaces”. The abundance of typefaces found in the book includes Romie by Margot Lévêque, Baskerville, Timmons by Matt Willey, Monotype’s Helvetica Now, as well as work by Jérémy Schneider, Violaine Orsoni, Pangram Pangram Foundry, Daniel Reed and Dinamo.

A true sense of authorship and individuality is found within the pages of ‘Things You Know’, using the exercise of making the book as a place for self-reflection as well as expression. The result is something truly unique and soulful, with great consideration given to both the content and its striking ebullient design.

Entirely designed and self-published by Friedman and McGinnis, ‘Things You Know’ will be printed at Kopa in Lithuania, with all profits for the book going towards Crown Heights-based non-profits as well as helping to fund photography programmes in public schools.

Max Friedman

Jamil McGinnis