How Do You Make the Shadows?

From the moment the first I Spy book was released in 1992, it became apparent that young children were very good at finding hidden objects. I was stunned to see the intensity they brought to the task. Jean Marzollo, whose rhyming riddles sent readers off on the hunt, was delighted to see how the search and find game leveled the playing field across a wide age range and reading levels. So when first encountering readers’ questions, they were rarely about where objects were hidden. Instead, they revealed another skill: their ability to “read” photographs – to discern, for example, that the objects depicted were grounded in a real-world context and should therefore behave accordingly. 

“How did you get that doll to balance?”

The question refers to the little blue doll in the lower left corner of the picture, “Blocks”. The 4-year-old had zeroed in with forensic precision on that doll, suspicious of its ability to balance on one leg. “Yes,” I confessed. “I did use a little glue to hold that doll in place.” 

What the exchange affirmed is that photography elicited a kind of inquiry in a way hand-drawn illustration would not. Imagine a hand-drawn version of the scene above. While a child would have no trouble describing the activity of the 3 doll-like figures using a kitchen utensil as a playground slide, they may not ask how the hand-drawn doll could balance on one foot. It’s an exquisitely subtle observation for a child not yet of reading age. And one that, to me, conjured an image of the cognitive gears turning inside her head. 

And the inquiries kept coming, this time from second-graders.
 
“How did you get those objects to float?”
  
“Did you throw the toys up in the air and take a quick picture?”
 
“Did you suspend the toys in clear plastic?”
 
“Did you travel to space and take the pictures in weightlessness?” 

These questions came in the form of a letter transcribed by a second-grade teacher following a classroom discussion. While the gravity-defying objects apparently elicited disbelief among the students, the suggested solutions are all grounded in reality—no magic wands, no anti-gravity machines are offered up. Once again, I can see the gears turning. So which solution is correct? Strictly speaking, none of them.
  
At first glance, throwing up the toys and capturing them in mid-air makes perfect sense, as that’s the illusion I was after. Having attempted this with far fewer objects, however, I knew capturing a perfect arrangement of multitudes by pure luck was not in the cards. Traveling to space, of course, would be prohibitively expensive, not to mention impractical. The kids probably knew that, but I love how the solution draws on their knowledge of gravitational conditions not of this Earth. Suspending the toys in clear plastic comes closest. They probably had in mind tabletops or shelf displays that show objects embedded inside a solid block of clear acrylic. My method was to arrange the objects on a clear glass table top, positioning objects at steep angles to convey movement, held in place with hot glue hidden behind each object. There was no encapsulating plastic, but some objects were affixed to aluminum armatures, lifting them an inch or more off the glass, positioned to create a sense of movement and cast shadows from one object to the next—a key to enhancing the illusion of “floating” objects. And that brings me to the last question. 

“How do you make the shadows?” 

This question caught me flat-footed for a moment. It came from a 4th grade boy, hand extended, seated on the floor of a school assembly room during the question and answer session during an author visit. It surprised me because the commonly held assumption is that shadows in photographs are recorded, not made. How brilliant that he didn’t just take shadows in photographs for granted. How correct he was that I was manipulating light for effect—not just accepting the conditions of lighting as I found them. “Nature” is a great example to explore how shadows are made. 

The sun-drenched scene evokes a freshly collected assemblage of natural curiosities after a walk in the woods. But that’s an illusion. It was photographed in my New York City studio, far from where the items were collected. I did not use natural light, but a bright, artificial light source, tinted with a warm gel, facilitating the warm highlights and crisp shadows. Another layer of softer shadows was created to evoke a sun-dappled effect by positioning a small, leafy tree branch in the path of the light, just out of frame. Finally, a second light, covered with a blue gel, was bounced off a white ceiling to imitate the way blue skies tint shadows in an outdoor setting. 

So indeed, shadows in the I Spy universe are “made” not merely recorded. But there may be another reason why the boy thought to pop the question: he may have seen that I occasionally hide objects that can only be identified by their shadows. “Nature” just happens to contain one of those examples. Can you spy the shadow of a little toy horse? 

It was about 15 years into my career as a photographer before I published my first picture book for children. While I had been shooting hundreds of magazine and book covers—once almost exclusively the domain of hand-drawn illustration—I was not unfamiliar with how differently (for better or worse) photographic illustration engaged audiences. However, the biggest surprise was how naturally and profoundly young readers engage with photographic images, and this has become an essential part of my dialogue with them ever since.