This image is slightly mind-bending the way it plays tricks with time and history. And, god, it even makes me want to cry! It does all this without using any original art work or words.

What it does use is...Photoshop.

The image was created by a freshman, Chelsea Noel. This is her response to an assignment in Seth Ellis' class, Digital Studio 1, a required course for all A&D students on the fundamentals of digital tools such as Photoshop. Seth's goal in this class was to figure out a way to teach the technical fundamentals of the program while also teaching students about the power of visual communication.

“It is a foundation course after all, " he says. "Drawing is essentially about learning how to look. Photoshop, as a tool for making and manipulating images, can also prompt students into really looking at visual information and examing how meaning is created."

The assignment above asked students to choose an image and then, using a method of erasure, alter the image in a way that significantly changes the meaning of the original.

Coincidentally, Marlene Lacasse also chose to extract a Beatle from Abbey Road. Together these images could set off another fire storm about which Beatle was most important. (Seth has no idea why this image would be hitting a chord with the young people.)

Here's another striking extraction by Hayley Tanisijevich:

I noticed how, even without the central figure, the painting still seems somehow 'pained'.

Here's an even more ominous use of Photoshop by Holly Prouty. Look how easily and perfectly the effects of pollution were erased:

In an act of mercy, perhaps, Samantha Balyeat chose to erase "Hiroshima bombers" from these men's resumés:

Here's the original:

Assignment Two: Insertion

So, "erasure" required students to get familiar enough with Photoshop to use the texture and clone tools, among others. In another exercise, Seth asked the students to alter an exisiting image through insertion.

Marlene Lacasse's insertion effectively depletes all terror from Yves Klein’s famous photo, “Leap into Void”:

The image below is actually of this School of Art & Design back in the 50s. Hayley Tanisijevich's grandfather attended the school and she chose to insert herself into this scene from the past.

Here's the original photo, which she found in the MLibrary Online Archives.

Lonny Marino applied her considerable drawing skills to the exercise. She drew a sketch of herself to insert into this picture in order to suggest an alternative narrative for this poor governess.

Here's the original:

Photoshop is brilliant and scary. Let's hope Seth's students continue to use it as a tool for good and not evil.

13 states. 23 cities.

Erika Hess is the new recruiting officer at A&D. Her new job has her living out of a suitcase and communing with strangers in airport lounges and hotel check-in counters. She travels to high schools around the country, talking to prospective A&D students and high school art teachers, and representing A&D at National Portfolio events. 

A practicing artist herself, Erika soon realized it wouldn't be easy to keep up with her creative activities on the road.

So she came up with a plan – a small plan,  but a plan that would keep her away from C.S.I. reruns and help her stay connected to her right brain.

She decided to document each hotel room experience with a self-portrait. Rules: use any mirrored surface to capture the composition and, wherever possible, use the hotel's provided stationary and pen.

Here's a sampling of Erika's life on the road, as told by Erika herself and her pen/pencil.

(And make sure to check out Erika's work when-not-on-the-road here.)

Students in Rebekah Modrak's CFC: Culture class are the culprits. They have been studying us – ie. the culture of A&D – all semester and now they have made their move to affect this culture in some way.

During her weeks of studying the school, its building and its people, Marla Jones noticed that, despite this being a school of "art and design," the actual architecture of the building was very traditional, devoid of color, with hard edges and bland surfaces. She decided to alter the environment for us by adding splashes of surprise and warmth, wrapping surfaces in wools and other materials which she knit herself.

Allison Knoll, on the other hand, noticed all the inner beauty of the building: the anonymous doodles of former students inscribed permanently on desks and walls, the soft wear of the stairs from so many shoes passing through...

She decided to make a tour map of the building's hidden treasures, which she then left at the coffee stand and other places for people to discover. She has no idea whether anyone actually took the tour.

While studying the school with this new intense focus,  Ji-Woo Won began to notice all the signs – the constant instruction, the voice of authority that prescribed a way of behaving. She decided to gently poke at this cultural norm by offering playful alternatives to the signs.

Ji-Woo told me that part of the fun for her was playing with logos and fonts and figuring out a way to mimic the typographic feel of the sign. The signs are done so skillfully that, for a moment, we can imagine what it would be like to live in Ji-Woo's version of A&D.

Ji-Woo was thrilled to find that her sign had indeed affected at least one person in the school. One day she came across a student pulling out papers from one of her altered recycle bins for his project.

Other students noticed the relationships among people as they moved through the school. Melissa Weisberg noticed that her fellow students often tuned each other out as the listened to their separate songs on their ipods. She decided to organize a silent rave where students were invited to send in their favorite songs and all listen to the same songs simultaneously after a Penny Stamps talk one day.

While at this same Michigan Theater, listening to a Penny Stamps speaker, Anya Klapischak had a longing to see the work of her fellow students on that very same stage.  "I came out of the research phase [of the class] completely struck by the level of work being done by the students of the school, " she says. "It’s amazing and inspiring and provocative- and somehow under-celebrated."

Anya decided to organize a 'coming-out party', asking students to donate $2 each to help rent that same Michigan Theater stage to show their work, one slide at a time. Anya wore a uniform every day for the whole semester as a commitment to her project and so students who wanted to donate would recognize her in the hallway.

[And, by the way, if you'd like to attend: the event will be held on Thursday, December 15th at 5pm at the Michigan Theater.   You can read a great interview with Anya here.]

Mary Clare Harrington observed that critiques were sometimes stressful events for most students here at A&D. She devised a friendly persona, "The Booth Lady", to offer a sympathetic ear. She noticed though, that the chair ultimately became a place to express secret desires, fears and philosophical musings – "anything really."  Mary Clare told me that one student sat down and told her that he had always had a desire to run and slide on the tables lined up along the hallway. The booth lady encouraged him to live his dream and he survived with only a minor injury.

Dean Rogers sat down at the booth lady's chair too. "I didn't actually know he was the Dean when he sat down," she admits. "The first thing he asked me was "do you believe in life after death?",  which kind of surprised me, but I went with it. We had a good conversation after that."

Sang Hyun Lee noticed that students around him don't always have a forum to articulate their goals and wishes for the future. He wanted to invite the students to think about their aspirations and create a collective place to share them with one another. So he built the "Wishing Tree" out of aluminum vent hose. The tree comes out of the wall, as if growing out of the school itself, holding the individual wishes of the students.

The students wrote out their wishes on ribbons and attached them to the tree. Sang wasn't sure what to do with the wishes once the tree had to come down. "I'm storing them in my room for now," he says. "I need to respect the thoughts that went into them."

On the quieter side, Isabel Cohen created this cocoon, a small dark cushiony place where students could find a moment of quietude or just darkness, to help them refuel during their day.

All in all, the kind of public engagement that this assignment incited was new to many of the students but seemed to expand their thinking about what art-making can be -- not necessarily tied to a specific media or material -- but a way of studying the world and responding to it.

And, by the way, if you're tired of picking out what to wear each day, the students also designed a uniform for the school as part of another assignment. Take a look at the photos below and see if any of them tickle your fancy.

Performance art? A pre-Halloween party with an all-white, modular theme?

No, these were students TMP (Tools, Materials and Processes) presenting their first efforts in making a wearable sculpture out of both paper and fibers. 

Specifically, the assignment was this:

Using only the provided materials (paper and glue, fabric and thread), create a wearable sculpture that is situated around your head (or head and shoulders). Your sculpture will have a function that you will determine (whimsical/utilitarian, poetic/practical, etc.)

So Kristen Leydig, above, developed this boxed headress contraption to help capture the outflow of ideas that occur in the process of brainstorming.

Instructors Matt Shlian and Beth Hay came up with the assignment for TMP, a core course that requires students to explore a variety of media in a short amount of time. This assignment was designed to introduce students to the basic technique of taking flat materials – in this case, fibers and papers – and exploring their three dimensional potential. Sounds great, except the students would have two weeks to both learn the basics of these materials and construct their project. Then they would move on to other TMP sections in wood, metals, plastics and clay.

First, Matt Shlian, a master paper engineer himself, shows the students some basic techniques for folding, cutting, twisting and shaping paper. (If you've ever seen Matt's work you know this goes way beyond making a pirate hat out of your restaurant placemat.)

Beth Hay guides the projects in the fibers studios.

Students then presented their pieces to the class for a group critique.

Below Sonia Tagari created this 'hat' that spoke to the blinding effects of one's personal fears and how they often translate to the outside world.

Below David Chang created a very useful device to combat what his mother calls a 'chronic forgetfulness'. He created a note-taking device that keeps the notes literally in front of his eyes at all times. A convenient pouch for the pen and the notes are located at the side and back.

Shannon Moss created this representation of her brain and its thought waves. She feels the weight of her thoughts and emotions mainly in the shoulder area.

Below Caroline Marin created about 70 hands, some stuffed fabric and some paper, to address fear – when something scares you, you can cover your face with this handy "hand-mask".

Below Viviana Pernot's piece mimics a fungus and its growth pattern. In this case, the growth is positive, open and receptive as she starts her first year of college, independent and separated from her family.

Virginia Lozano pulled off an amazing feat in this mechanically complicated creation complete with wheels made entirely of paper. Virginia is a dual major in...yes, Mechanical Engineering. What a beautiful combo.

Next, these TMP will be off to the ceramics studio where they will work with clay and mold-making techniques. Stay tuned.

And, student Riccardo Volpato (from Milan!) created these gloves so that you can now nervously drum your fingers on the tabletop and make music at the same time.  Richard used the Lilypad microcontroller to read force-sensing resistor signals, then play musical notes.

In the meantime, while her students were busy learning programming and how to sew with electronic wire, Heidi Kumao turned Frida Kahlo on us and figured out a way to make art despite her pain. Using her back brace as a writable surface and still slightly hazy from the vicodin, Heidi started working on a photo series as a response to her new unwelcomed condition as an invalid.

Here are some of my favorites from what is destined to become a bestselling calendar called "Embracing the Brace." Who knew that a sledding accident would produce a whole new line of wearables? Get well soon Heidi!

As it turns out, this is not a sculpture involving some student’s unresolved early childhood issues. It’s a photo of an actual specimen that can be found in the Mammals Collection at the Museum of Zoology, a sub section of the Exhibit Museum of Natural History on central campus.

The subject in the photo is a sloth, which was student Carolyn Nowak’s chosen specimen for the class Making Science Visible, taught by cross-over artist/scientist Brad Smith.  (Brad Smith has a dual appointment in the department of Radiology and School of Art & Design and has made a career out of bridging the worlds of science and art through his work using MRI technology to visualize embryos.)

Brad’s class began with a behind-the-scenes tour of all the collections at the Museum. Pouring through the rows and rows of pickled frogs, drawers full of stuffed peacocks, and shelves loaded with mammal bones the students were asked to pick one specimen, and one specimen only, to observe, draw, photograph, x-ray and interpret throughout the semester.

Carolyn Nowak (see sloth image above) knew she wanted to work with an intact animal, so when looking for her specimen she concentrated on the mammal fluids room. She writes, “Most of the specimens were rodents, their buggy eyes bleached white from the alcohol. The sloth caught my eye because it looked almost alive. Its eyes were closed so they didn't look all scary and white, and its mouth was almost in a smile. He looked like he was peacefully sleeping, floating there in the brownish liquid.”

Below, Amphibian/Reptilian Collection Manager Greg Schneider tries to interest the students in the Goliath Frog, one of the largest frogs in the world and found in the tropical rainforests of Cameroon.  The museum’s amphibian/reptile collection has 425,000 individual specimens and is the second largest collection in the world.

From tiny hummingbirds to giant ostriches, Janet Hinshaw introduces the students to the bird collection. In the foreground-- rows and rows of Scarlet Tanagers.

Here, Janet holds up the Sword-billed Hummingbird for the students to see.

Student Christina Ley chose the South American bird, the Quetzal, from the bird collection. Below are her responses to the drawing and photo assignments

Choosing just one out of the thousands of juicy specimens to be found in the museum's collections was a challenge, but Brad wanted to reduce the variables in the assignments so students could clearly see the impact of various approaches to scientific material. ‘Sometimes direct observation and drawing is called for, but often the artist is required to interpret. For example, you can’t look at a cadaver and convey the idea of muscle tissue. In actuality it’s too messy for a viewer to make sense of. The artist needs to ‘interpret’ what s/he sees, using a cross between direct observation drawing and interpretive drawing in order to communicate how muscle tissue appears in the body.”

After committing to one specimen, each student spent an entire month in the museum learning about and observing his/her chosen subject.

There, the students worked on the first assignment-- direct observation drawing.

Carolyn says, “The hardest part about working with the sloth was depicting its hair. Sloths have hollow hairs so they're extra thick. I actually had to try quite hard to capture the texture.”

Next the students arranged for a photo shoot with their specimens, arriving with lights, tripods, macro lenses, sets, and backgrounds to create a photographic representation of their chosen creature. This explains how this snowshoe hare came to look like a gigantic pussy willow pinned to an abstract landscape of budding green. (Photo by Erica Lazar.)

Casey Wasko's photograph of the bat...

Next up, students used x-ray photography to explore the specimens. It was another kind of photo shoot really, but one involving the radiologists-turned-photographers Karen Carter and Jim Good in the Department of Radiology at the U of M hospital.

Radiology required that all the specimens arrive in zip lock bags — a particularly difficult rule for the penguin. But Brad was able to purchase shrinkable sweater bags so the penguin could comply. Students sat in the waiting room with their specimen in their laps along with patients waiting for their own diagnostic x-rays.

Again, students were in charge of the shoot, making compositional decisions for their pieces. This is how a beanie baby bunny turned up next to the katydids.

(Erica McTurk actually went into the lab twice, the second time armed with the bunny so she could better accentuate the qualities of the katydids, which were tiny and difficult to x-ray..)

The next assignment asked students to communicate a concept/idea about their specimen such as life cycles, migration patterns, etc.

Erika Lazar depicts the molting patterns of the snowshoe hare...

The last assignment was an emotional or expressive response to the subject. 

Amanda Mayer created a rain stick in response to the cicada she had been studying....

Casey Wasko created a bat that literally gets in your hair...

For her final assignment Carolyn chose to make a sloth doll using twine to showcase the unique qualities of the sloth’s hair.

Though about half the students were interested in a career in scientific illustration, the other half confessed to simply having an interest in science. 

“Making Science Visible” is of course a large topic and Brad could have chosen any number of scientific areas to explore - physics, neuroscience, molecular biology– but he wanted the students to start out addressing real physical specimens rather than the more complicated problem of visualizing abstract concepts. 

I recently read this article calling for the fusion of the currently distinct cultures of art and science, asking for us to move beyond the current paradigm where artists are called in to communicate scientific ideas and concepts.  The article by Jonah Lerher asks: is it possible for these two fields to learn from each other?

"But what of the collaboration between science and the arts? Are we really prepared to live with a permanent cultural schism? If we are serious about unifying human knowledge, then we’ll need to create a new movement... [The goal of this movement] will be to cultivate a positive feedback loop, in which works of art lead to new scientific experiments, which lead to new works of art and so on. Instead of ignoring each other, or competing, or co-opting each other in naïve or superficial ways, science and the arts will truly impact each other. The old intellectual boundaries will disappear. Neuroscience will gain new tools with which to confront the mystery of consciousness and modern physics will improve its metaphors. Art will become a crucial source of scientific ideas."

It seems the university is a good place for Lehrer's new culture to be born. Perhaps it starts with a quick bus stop from North Campus down to main.

Ashley Boudrie and the Amia Calva from the Fish Collection

Ji-Woo Won and the horned beetle from the Insects Collection.

A&D seniors have a whole year to conceive and develop a substantial body of work that gets unveiled at the end of the year in venues all around the city. For many students, thinking about how to exhibit their work is low on their list of priorities. They are too busy concentrating on (or fretting about) the making process.

So it was Reed Esslinger-Payet and Sarah Berkeley, two graduate students working as GSIs for I.P, who noticed an opening in the calendar of the graduate student gallery and claimed it for the seniors.  "We really thought it was important for the students to start thinking about the realities of putting up a show. And the only way to really learn about this is to do it," says Reed. She and Sarah organized the students into committees for publicity, curating and installation and from then on, it was up to the students to put up the show.

"We were mostly excited when we heard the news," says Meredith Hoffman who minors in biology. "There are a lot of technical issues you don't think about until you're in the gallery.  My canvas is so large it was hard to transport without ruining it. And just taking the work out of the studio and seeing it in a different context than my studio has been so important.  The light is different here and there is all this other work around it that changes its impact. " says Meredith.

Here is Meredith beside her large scale drawing of the intestinal villi:

Who knew your small intestine could be so beautiful?

Meredith is interested in how biological organisms are depicted in medical literature and is working on playing with and stretching the rules and conventions of this particular visual language. In this series below, she made a rubber stamp and used various inking techniques to explore representations of the cell membrane.

Saree Silverman, below, is working on a series of sculptural shapes made out of foxtail seeds. 

Foxtail seeds?  Saree explains, "I started out the semester taking long walks in the woods and doing a lot of thinking about what was important to me. When I returned I would always have these seeds stuck to me. I suddenly became really interested in the seeds as a material and as metaphor." 

The first sculpture she tried to hang soon ripped apart. It turns out it's not so easy to hang delicate seed constructions. Now Saree is experimenting with which shapes will hold, whether they should be hung on the wall or against a window.

Saree's other explorations are in paper clay, a clay mixed with cellulose that allows you to make very precise thin objects...like replicas of ginko leaves. She loves ginko trees and is fascinated by their history. "They are the oldest living tree today. I found out that when Hiroshima was bombed, six of these ginko trees were left standing. They're very hardy. I'm exploring the relationship between fragility and resilence."

Saree made each of these clay leaves from a unique ginko leaf that she collected in the fall but she still hasn't figured out how to display them or even whether they will be part of her final project. "I'm just experimenting right now but this is the kind of problem-solving that you have to do by just trying it out," she says.

For Caroline Aulis, who would like to develop an installation where time appears to slow down, how her materials will behave in the gallery is the big unknown. Caroline has spent a lot of time conceptually mapping out her thesis and making sketches but this show is forcing her to really test out her ideas.

"I'd really like to challenge the movement and flow of liquid materials, so my idea is to hang frozen water sculptures and see if I can replicate this feeling of suspension or suspended time."

Caroline is basing her project on an Italian phrase, "dolce far niente", which means "the sweetness of doing nothing, or delicious idleness", a phrase she learned during her semester abroad in Italy. "I was so struck by the relaxed pace of life there. In Italy there's no such thing as a "coffee to go". And then I came back here and everything was so fast and hectic. So I'm interested in slowing us down – to suspend a moment in time."
 

Below are the ice balls she made by freezing water balloons in the snow. She hangs the shapes with fishing line. "It makes me nervous to do this and put it out there without having everything worked out, but I have to start somewhere!" she admits.

It turns out the ice balls took less then three hours to melt completely under the hot gallery lights. Besides moving her installation to the arctic, she is now on the hunt for other possible materials that will achieve her desired effect.

If you have any ideas let her know!

Come by for the exhibition's closing reception on Wednesday, January 25th in the Warren Robbins gallery to see this and other works in progress by the 20 some students in the show.

It’s been a great relationship: students get a real world broadcast outlet for their work and the PLAY series has a creative, award-winning graphics campaign that doesn't look like anything else on tv.

One of the first animations (from 2006 and still one of my favorites) was this one by Belal Hibri. (It was also the first time Belal had ever worked in After Effects!) 


 

The following year, senior Jeff Christy became our animator-in-residence and produced these great promos for which he won a Michigan EMMY award.

Last year, Heidi and I decided to have the students create stop motion animations using logo pieces laser cut out of wood.  This approach left less opportunities for experimenting with the formal qualities of the logo’s design, so students focused on the challenges of creating a sense of narrative within 6-10 seconds. (This campaign was also nominated for an EMMY!):

Shark, by Kavita Lokchander

Bob Ross by Shannon Kohlitz

So, this year, a fresh crop! We had a new logo to play with and, returning to After Effects, students could again explore the qualities of the logo. This exercise is an interesting challenge for students because it has lots of limitations (a logo/brand identity to adhere to, a 6 second time limit, a client, (me!)) yet the stakes are high and students seem to rise to the challenge every time.

The animation has to be good enough to air on tv, so the key is refining, refining, refining. They have to be prepared to start over if their ideas aren't working and, rather than leave the assignment at a typically student level, their job is to make every second of the piece look professional. Working with a short form like this is great practice for longer animations. (And in animation, you have to remember, six seconds is a lot of work!)

For many of these students, this was their first time working in After Effects. Take a look at a few of my favorites:

by UBin Li

by Betsy Peters

by Jackie Endres

by Emily Sajewski

by Stephanie Schutter

by Ran Li

Congratulations to the students for their great work and keep an eye out for these animations on TV!

(And, here's a shout out to Ilene and Marc Steglitz who have supported the PLAY project throughout the years. It's a wonderful thing!)

The students spent the semester studying a wide historical and cultural spectrum of creative people and creative works. Their final project was to contextualize their learning into an art project that re-visions the timeline. Students presented what they had learned through various sculptural works that had some sort of time axis including a kind of  "breast plate" such that Jessica is holding above,  a series of color coded & delicious-smelling cupcakes that were being stashed in the grad lounge (I wonder why!>):

and this poster below made entirely of square post-it notes. Each post-it contained a beautifully drawn image somehow invoking that creator's work.

Students also had to write essays as part of this course, but this assignment seems to have been added as way of allowing the pedagogical information to get entrenched into the memory through a little right-brain activity.

Jessica herself had just finished installing her work in Touch, now playing at WORK • Detroit. This show, unlike most "do-not-touch-the-art" exhibits, is all about getting touchy and feely with the works in the gallery.

Jessica's piece started as sculptural forms on the gallery floor made up of individual "drawings" created out of dyed glue.

Visitors were invited to participate in the creation of the wall piece by arranging the forms on the wall. 

This piece reflects a desire on Jessica's part to move her painting into the realm of sculpture. I love the membrane-feel of these pieces which seems to be an aesthetic theme in Jessica's work.

She's now working with the membranes of clementine oranges~ beautiful!

I'm looking forward to seeing where this will go! In the meantime, get your Touch on at WORK • Detroit!

Reframing Photography: Theory and Practice is Rebekah’s response to a challenge – to create the most relevant, comprehensive, all encompassing guide to photography ever – a dream book, in other words.

Except this book is not really about photography in the usual sense of the word. “When someone says ‘photography’ I think of guys in vests talking about lenses,” she says. “This book is really about photo-based arts in the widest possible sense, so we include things like zoetropes, flip books and performance art as well as other artists who wouldn’t necessarily label themselves as “photographers.””

k r buxey: My Dinner Party

Rebekah has been working on this text for... well, a long time. “I’ve been telling people it’s been an eight year project, for, hmm... I think the past three years.” She seems both elated and fatigued, incredulous even. The book is done.

It turns out it was never Rebekah’s intention to write a book on photography but rather, this is one of those “careful what you ask for” tales. Here’s how it happened:

"I was teaching photography in the Department of Art at Ohio State University when a publisher came to visit the school.  My colleagues and I were complaining to her about the texts that existed for photography. Most of the available technique books seemed so out of date. They covered basics like lighting, lenses, tripods, exposures, etc. but they all assumed that the photography you’d be practicing would be print based and the examples they would give were usually documentation-style photos. From a text-book perspective, it was like photography got stuck in the 40s and 50s. There’s more to photography than Ansel Adams!”

Jan Dunning: Untitled (Box Room)

Charles Fairbanks: Billboard Modification

So, as a teacher, she supplemented the technical texts with essays and other readings, so students would be stimulated to expand their thinking about what photography could be. This was a problem because, as teachers, she and her colleagues were also trying to instill the idea that theory and practice should not be separated.

So the publisher invited them to write a proposal for their ideal classroom book.  Little did she know then that she would be the person writing it, along with her colleague Bill Anthes. It reminds me of how my father-in-law used to say, “ I always thought it was my dream in life to open a crepe restaurant. And then I realized I just wanted to eat them.” It’s kind of like that.”

Turns out it takes a long time to write the ideal guide to photography. Rebekah explains in the forward to the book:

We fantasized about our ideal book. It would integrate theory, history, and practice. And it would reveal a broader range of possibilities in the meaning of the word “photographic.” After all, what’s so exciting about photography is its omnipresence. Photography isn’t just Adobe Photoshop or a print. It’s about actions involving looking. It’s the act of reproducing an image an endless number of times. It’s about questions of truth and authenticity. It’s about pausing something that has life and movement so that we can watch it when it’s still. It’s about creating movement through fixed images. It’s about the play of light and shadow. It’s about finding photography in architecture and landscape, in design, in science, in everyday acts, and in making connections with the larger world.

Jessica Frelinghuysen: Personal Horizon Lines

So the book includes essays and work featuring performance artists, billboard activists, installation artists, artists who are using staining, rubbings, collage, etc.

How-to techniques cover the usual stuff about lenses, digital and film-based camera features, and exposure, but also give instructions and schematics for pinhole cameras, zoetropes, shadow puppets, cell phone cameras, scanners and photocopiers, light-box construction, book arts, web-based portfolios, image transfers and whew, much, much more. Did I say this book was comprehensive? No wonder it took eight or eleven or really god knows how long to make since Rebekah herself has lost count.

I love the photos she uses for lighting examples, featuring Sarah Buckius:

Announcement: and, a website is born!

The website for the book was a project in itself. It features over 50 video interviews with artists, a comprehensive resource guide with image archives and a resource with hundreds of artists using photography, a blog roll, tutorials and more. We also posted a series of Rebekah’ s DIY tutorials on the PLAY website, so check them out.

The book is out in the UK and is now listed for pre-ordering in the U.S. on Amazon.com.  Order yours today - and congratulations, Rebekah!

(Already, the book has been chosen as the Top Title in English on www.deastore.com, Italy's biggest Amazon-style website. Is that Vanna White?)