Jessica F. Simmons

WILSON N.C — In celebration of Women’s History Month, Jessica Simmons, an intern in the Office of Marketing and Communications, interviewed Barton’s female faculty, staff, and students to share their challenges and insights about their roles as women.  HERstory features individual women and shares their personal stories of their proudest moments being women.

Scroll for PDF version of book layout

Photo by Maureen O’Neill

The Process

This project lasted for several months.

In History is HERstory too, I was able to showcase all of my skills such as photography, editing, graphic design, journalism, and campaigning under the Office of Marketing and Communication.

Originally, I had a limit of finding 10 women.

However, after interviewing each person, I felt inspired to talk to more, resulting in 16 women total.

In determining participants, I looked for women of all different backgrounds whether it be race, position, age, and personality. Instead of using women that I already knew, I looked for women that I never talked to.

For each portrait, I traveled around the Barton campus scouting for locations to place my participants, and posed each one in a way that represented happiness and confidence.

The camera I used was the Canon EOS 60D.

Images were edited using Adobe Photoshop and arranged electronically in Adobe InDesign to map out each page of the book.

For printing, I used three 13 x 19 double-sided semi-gloss paper and cut them in half for a smaller size.

In binding, I followed a Japanese stab binding technique for the cover and pages, and sewed the pages together by hand.