Some of the most famous images in the world were on display in St. Albert last week. Well, they looked a lot like them anyway. The photographs were actually excellent recreations realized by a class full of creative elementary students and another class full of creative high school photography students.
Leo Nickerson art teacher Andrea Daly saw a similar project through a colleague in the Sturgeon School Division and thought it was a great idea for a joint venture with her students and their older artistic counterparts.
“The kids had to dress up as a famous character. I had seen a couple of the pictures and I said, ‘can I use this idea because I’d really love to do something to do with iconic photos?’ I wanted to do it as a collaborative project. I’m a huge fan of any time we can cross the ages and make connections between the different levels of schooling,” Daly explained. “With Paul Kane just being down the street from Leo Nickerson, it was absolutely perfect!”
She contacted Jim Dosman who teaches photography at PK. While Daly helped her elementary students research and plan their pictures, they collected the props and costumes while Dosman’s class figured out what was technically needed to achieve the right end results.
It sounds like a simple idea but ended up being a tremendous amount of work. Costuming and makeup is not a simple matter of digging through the closet. After all, you need the right details in order to dress like Vermeer’s The Girl With The Pearl Earring or to have the right amount of facial stubble in order to pass off as Jack Nicholson breaking through the bathroom door in The Shining.
The modern business of digital photography is no walk in the park either. There’s no end to the amount of large, heavy and expensive equipment that a photographer must be familiar with in order to get the right image.
“We took our front foyer and basically turned it into a huge photo studio. They brought green screens, neutral backgrounds, and all the equipment and whatnot. We had about 200 kids – all the Grade 3s and 4s – got dressed up that day. They were photographing about eight at a time through the different stations.”
The end results looked like a million bucks.
Now, you can visit the school and see Bobby Orr’s famous flying goal, Malala Yousafzai with her “I am stronger than fear” poster, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, and Anne of Green Gables, along with Albert Einstein, a few Charlie Chaplins, Alice in Wonderland, Rosie the Riveter, Salvador Dali, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, Barack Obama, and countless others.
“I was just blown away by what they did!”
