Despite the proddings of conventional wisdom, it certainly is not true that adults suddenly lose their ability to imagine once they leave childhood behind; at least, in my experience, many don’t. But there is still the danger that, as our years advance, we become so reliant on what we know that we lose the child’s simple faith in the unexpected, in magic lurking around the corner, and within everyday objects. While creatives—as they’re called, in a heap—certainly represent a check on that pattern, it is a special subset of these, children’s book authors and illustrators, who do so most directly. For isn’t managing to keep in touch with childish things, while also managing quite well when it comes to the very grown-up matter of doing good business, something of a magic trick itself?
And so we arrive at Walter Wick, a photographer and model builder who has been puzzling and amazing young readers with his popular I Spy and Can You See What I See? book series for more than three decades. Wick’s signature handiwork, the subject of Hidden Wonders, a current retrospective at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa, should be familiar to any parent who’s raised children since the ’90s—not to mention many of those children themselves. The setup is simple. The photographer marshals a cast of everyday objects—toys, costume jewelry, leaves and twigs, odds and ends found about the house—that is, all the things only a kid could treasure. These objects are then arranged into tableaux that conform to various themes (natural items, buttons, a day at the beach, blocks, things that are red), many of which seem to defy the laws of physics. Objects balance improbably on one another; or float in front of sky-like backdrops, suspended by (one assumes) invisible wires; or are multiplied into infinity by mirrors. Indeed, since fully half of the work on view at the Figge was made in the days before digital manipulation, some fabulous twist on ordinary reality had to be at play. (I will not give away Wick’s methods here—visit the show, which also includes several of the photographer’s miniature sets, if you must know.) If trick photography fills viewers with wonder, the magic is how Wick makes the familiar vanish—melting into the throng of things, or asked to act an unusual part. Rhymes by I Spy’s co-creator Jean Marzollo, simple but never patronizing, prompt young readers to recover what has disappeared, and the hunt becomes an exercise in thoughtful looking. It may be helpful to turn your head sideways until—voila! What seemed to be a water tower tank is actually a baseball, a stool is a skyscraper, an antenna is a side comb. Camouflaged against a wooden ball is a rubber band—who knew that they partook of the identical blonde essence?—and, looking for the “button with a square,” a child or even an adult may realize, maybe for the first time, that many things that look alike actually aren’t.
Against the white walls of the Figge, Wick’s saturated, crisply focused images are blown up to thirty by fifty inches, or larger, the sort of treatment that’s usually reserved for photography in contemporary art galleries. Indeed, there are art historical precedents that we could trot out—the early commercial work of Paul Outerbridge, certainly, the conceptual photography of the ’80s and ’90s, even the still life tradition, in particular the history of allegory—but if we’re being fair, is it accurate to call this work art? Unless you subscribe to the idea that what makes its way into art museums automatically receives that stamp, the answer is no, at least not Art with a capital A. It’s too directed, its function too sharply delimited for that. But if the question is whether it is artful, and carries forward an ethos that is central to the inquisitive life, and therefore, yes, to art-making—that is a different, and, I think, more fruitful course of inquiry. For what these photographs do offer is evidence of a simple truth, one that all children know, or at least suspect: that objects have secret lives that go beyond their normal uses—the germ of play, and much more as well.
One more point: the photographer is, himself, a collector, though of more undiscriminating taste than most readers of ANTIQUES will be familiar with. And in the first gallery that museumgoers enter, which treats the last book, chronologically, that Wick published (Can You See What I See?: Curiosity Shop, 2024), it’s easy to imagine the photographer reflecting on his life, spent regarding the material stuff of life with interest and affection. Page one shows the facade of the titular curiosity shop. As the pages turn, readers dive deeper into details of that initial image until they pop right out the other end, and come face to face with what must look much like the studio of the photographer himself, as much a curiosity shop as its fictional counterpart. Is this art? That question isn’t as easy to answer.
Walter Wick: Hidden Wonders! • Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa • to November 17 • figgeartmuseum.org
