Photographers recreate their favorite photos with toilet paper
At the end of March, during quarantine, Bay Area photographers Jenny Sampson, Colleen Mullins, Nicole White, and Christy McDonald embarked on a new creative approach. They started making daily homages to their favorite photographs, in toilet paper.
“Thinking about the seriousness of the moment combined with the surreal quality of what was occurring around us”, the photographers said, “we thought that we should make images to occupy our time and give us something to work on while in our homes”.
Making at least one new image every day and posting to the Instagram account “Rolls and Tubes”, the project references the canonical 1978 photography exhibition entitled, “Mirrors and Windows,” curated by John Szarkowski at MOMA. Barely two weeks after launching on Instagram, they already have enough images for a thorough exhibition. They’re also being mindful not to waste. They often use only a single square in a shoot, and never throw anything away.
For these photographers, adding humor doesn’t diminish the real crisis that many, especially older and at-risk individuals, experience. It’s a means to connect. “While we are lucky to be healthy,” says Mullins, “we feel a little like those characters on The Walking Dead, who reside in Alexandria, a pre-apocalypse community who never really lived out among Zombies. We empathize with the loss, pain, and anguish people are experiencing”.
Rolls and Tubes are more than a one-liner. It builds on the almost-stale genre of photo appropriation with a new hyper-relevant and hilariously inventive style. We can’t wait to see how it evolves.
Source hafny.org
