iSpy photographic illustrator has new exhibit at Figge

Millions of kids grew up finding toys and small objects in the iSpy books. The photographic illustrator behind the books, Walter Wick, has a new exhibit at the Figge, 225 W. Second Street in Davenport. The exhibit runs now through November and admission is free through the end of July. Wick spoke with Our Quad Cities News about his work, how he finds inspiration and how he sets up those complicated shots.

“It’s a long time in the making; there’s 50 years of work in this exhibit,” he said. “I think there’s something like 70 works of art here. The exhibition started at the New Britain Museum of American Art, and it’s now come to the Figge here. The most notable pictures that visitors will recognize are the iSpy pictures from my iSpy books.”

“I think my fascination is with making photographs that you want to look at for a very long time,” he continued. “I discovered at some point that creating a search and find game would get that ball rolling, get people interested in looking and going from one part of the picture to another to another and to another.”

One of Wick’s most fascinating works was based on science experiments that were popular in the 1800s. “That was inspired by a series of old science books from the 19 ^th century where they would show science experiments for families to try out with ordinary objects. They would talk about balancing and they would put a whole set of dominoes balancing on a single domino and so I changed it to 117 toys balancing on a single Lego block. They’re really balancing, they’re not glued, there’s no hidden supports.”

Wick counts comic books, Mad Magazine and artistic album covers from decades ago as his inspirations. “Album covers were a big deal for me because I loved music at that time. This would be in the 1960s and the 1970s, so that was my visual culture. I love games and very early in my photographic career in New York City, I went to Games Magazine and sold them on some ideas to create photographic puzzles. That really started the ball rolling. Later I met Jean Marzollo, who is a writer for Children’s Magazine. She called and I did some posters for her. It was from these posters that we got the idea to do the iSpy books for children.”

Wick’s early works used found objects. “In the beginning, I just used the objects I had around the studio and from past photo shoots that I did for the children’s magazine. I used some of the objects I already had and because it was such a new idea and so fresh, anything I had would make a pretty good, fresh-looking photograph.”

Wick and his wife collect antique toys from flea markets, so an early composition featured items from their collection. “Once the book took off, I would go out and get more props for subsequent things. A lot of times I would go to flea markets, that’s my favorite place to find props.”

Wick has a new book coming out that explains the background of the props. “It’s actually called ‘Curiosity Shop,’ so it answers the question, ‘where do I get the props’. It’s all about a curiosity shop where you would find these incredible strange and weird things inside an antique store. It’s sort of an idealized antique store, it’s all the stuff you really want to see not the stuff you don’t want to see.” The book, along with other works from Wick, are available in the museum’s gift shop and at bookstores.

Sometimes projects are inspired by earlier work. “This is a picture from a book I did called ‘Hey Seymour.’ It’s a takeoff on a picture I had done that was a balloon popper. This one is a balloon launcher, and it really works. There’s a video here in the gallery that shows this machine actually working. Even though it’s a still photograph in a book and you can’t see it work, I actually made it so that it would actually work to give the photograph more integrity, make it believable. It’s a very intricate puzzle; kids can search and find and look for the objects in my rhyme, but they could also try to figure out what would happen if Seymour and his dog Buttons if he started to pull on that ring. The hammer would come and hit that marble and then start to roll down and you could try to piece together how it actually works. It’s a puzzle within a puzzle. I love the fact that I’ve been able to incorporate optical illusions, science narrative stories and all kinds of variety of different things to apply to this simple game of search and find.”

Some of the more complicated pieces require advance planning. “The optical illusions are planned in advance so I can choose the optical illusion of certain kind of impossible objects and then I plan it out so that I can make it work as a search and find game with lots of little toys everywhere but also have the added value of seeing the optical illusion as well. It’s almost like a separate feature of the photograph, so everything is really intricately planned. The very first iSpy book was very spontaneous, but it didn’t contain optical illusions per se, it was just a beautiful arrangement of a variety of different types of toys and common objects and found objects. I didn’t want to just keep reshuffling the same objects and then putting a new rhyme on it.”

“I began to develop the books so that there were different themes that could be incorporated into the search and find game, like optical illusions, narrative stories, cause and effect machines that you can figure out, puzzle out tricks with mirrors and that kind of thing,” Wick said. “I like to keep the kids thinking about what’s going on in the picture. This exhibition highlights those extra special features more so than if you were just to pick up a book at random. I’ve selected what I think are the very, very best examples for that come from the search and find books.”

He tried out some of his works before showing them to the public. “I used to go out to schools all the time and show behind the scenes of my work. When I put things up on the screen, I could see the reaction that kids have so I could understand which pictures resonated with them. I feel like I’ve achieved something really, really unique in my illustration, but you can’t help but want to highlight that in an exhibition like this.”

Wick credits hard work for his success. “The nature of the search and find game books is such that it you can apply it to so many different themes, you can apply it to so many different visual motifs. I wouldn’t say that it’s easy to come up with new ideas all the time, but I just work very hard at it.”

Click here for more information about the exhibit and the Figge Museum.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to WHBF - OurQuadCities.com.