fotoplay: graphic design

Yesterday was the first day of my residency at the Camden Rockport Elementary School. As I wrote in an earlier post, the focus of the workshop is concrete poetry, where the students will create their own concrete poems using one of the photographs of their playground that I created. Unlike most of my Fotoplay pages, these were intentionally created without a written prompt. I didn’t want my words to get in the way of their words. This first day was all about play; students were free to play off of the black and white image in any way. They were not writing their poems, they were just playing with ideas graphically…

Some added figures with talking bubbles…

Many students used the image as a playground, with miniature figures climbing, hanging, and sliding off of the forms…

This was probably the most popular approach…

using my photographs to create a place for small figures to play…

creating fantastical playgrounds like the one below. On the left, a waterslide with someone tubing, a climbing wall with a green figure, and in the center, an aquarium with sharks.

Some children used the page to tell one story, with a few figures, and some event happening …

…like an unhappy figure falling off an an energized (electrified?) space… under a blue sky with the shining sun…

A few children transformed the image into something far beyond an actual playground. Like the girl who turned the slide below into a movie theater with an alien on the screen.

Third grade teacher Mr. S. joined in and created an abstracted vignette of a creature…

There were also students who used the images as a basis for something essentially graphic…

This one with a foot in both worlds… the reality of a playground, and the world of color, shape, and line…

And this one, which moves completely beyond the swirly ladder in the playground, to a new realm of pure geometry and color…