december fotoplay: gallery 10

It’s New Year’s Eve, and photographs of two new December Fotoplay cards, that I think are so appropriate to this day, have arrived in my inbox. The card above, with a few more images below, was sent to me by a new friend, Jan, who I met while traveling in the Netherlands this summer. Along with the photographs of his clever work, he wrote me the following email: Hello and Season’s Greetings Marcie. I very much enjoyed making your Fotoplay card, but the thinking behind my work is maybe not so enjoyable. I made this animation strip, “Emoticon World,” in response to how truly sick I am of corresponding by email and Facebook, and how depressed I so often feel after engaging in any of the above.

Maybe it’s a good thing, at the end of the year, for me to be thinking about what I don’t want my New Year to look like. I don’t want to write things to people and then have to tell them, by emoticon, how they should feel about what I wrote. I want to write with absolute clarity, so that an emoticon is absolutely not necessary. Actually no, what I really want is to spend much less time writing and much more time talking, face-to-face: real live expression facing real live expression. This is what I want. This is my New Year’s Resolution. I’m wishing it for you too. All the best, Jan.

Now there’s a resolution! It’s what so many people are actually thinking, but not saying…

The next set of photographs that came to me were sent by a friend who I met years ago at Scuola Lorenzo de’ Medici in Italy, who now lives in Seattle with her partner. Laura is the mom of a six year old, who spends as much time as possible making things with her daughter Ella.

As Laura told me in her email: We decided to make a doll out of your card, but the longer we worked, the more elaborate both the project and the ideas surrounding it became! The idea was to make a doll that was not only “faceless,” but two-faced, like Janus, the two-faced god that will usher us into the future and into January.

The reason I mention the “not-faceless” piece is because Ella goes to a Waldorf school near Seattle, and has been having some nightmares in response to the faceless dolls that she makes at the school. So she insisted that this doll have a face. And when I told her the story of Janus – the two-faced god who looks to both the past and the future, and who moves through a doorway into the next year – she was right there with me. Using your card, we made two dolls, glued back-to-back, and then we made a simple stand out of cardboard. Also using cardboard, we made a simplified dollhouse of a wall and a floor and a doorway.

When I asked Ella how we could make something that felt like a “New Year,” she didn’t quite know what to say.

So I asked her how we could make two spaces, one that would be the past, and one that would be brand new, like the future, and she came up with the idea of a world of no color and dead branches on one side of the door, and a world of all color and live plants on the other side.

This was such a fun project for both of us. And Ella has not stopped playing with her new two-faced doll!