2012: a year in review

Because it’s impossible to come to the end of the year without reflecting and assessing, I thought I’d take a moment to look again at some bright lights from a year of Fotoplay pages. These are not necessarily pages that are the “best” pages in any sort of contest-y way. But because of creative choices made by their makers, these pages gave me new (and clearer) ideas for ways of using photographic images as creative prompts. They were eye-opening…they made me pause…reminders of the remarkable, unpredictable ways that people choose to express themselves.

This utterly modern zebra-monster by a 3 year old…

…and this one, oozing with panache…

…this work by a 4 year old… A prompt is an invitation to play a visual game…

…and this by an 8 year old who rewrote the prompt so that the page really was about him…

…these pages by kids in my summer workshop, a reminder of what watercolor can be and do…

…Fotoplay self-portraits by another summer workshop group,

…free and expressionistic…

…an opportunity to design and re-design one’s Self…

…works above and below by adults, teachers working side-by-side with their students…

…which then led to the work below…

…by a 4 year old, her first collage ever, (clearly kids don’t need to be limited to crayons)…

…so many works by a Master Fotoplay Artist 🙂 which I wrote about here and here and here…

…this high-fashion-inspired work by a 9 year old boy,

…pages that were curious and laugh out loud funny…

…dramatic pages made (anonymously) in the hospital ER…

…pages made with the lightest touch…

…clear, lovely, straight-forward images…

…heart-centered, distilled images (this one above also from the hospital ER)…

…very funny images…

…really moving images, like these above and below by teens in a residential therapy center…

…and pages that were moving for other reasons…

…like these, made by my son (which was like the best birthday gift ever)…

…all of the works made (see the full Gallery here!) by the students at the Early Stage English language school in Warsaw, Poland…

…pages that were personal…

…that are part of a dialogue…

…pages where anything goes…

 …and this big, complex surprise sent to me by a 9 year old Early Stage student…

Finally, the page below, by a 2 year old girl…

Honestly, I left out tons of other pages. But if you’re still reading (!), if I’ve managed to hold your attention this long, then you might want to take a look at even more work, which you can find right here in the Fotoplay Gallery. All of these pages together equal one cool year, and one cool way to look back at 2012…and maybe also one cool way to look forward to 2013…