In Motion: How I Spy Books are Made

If you were a child (or the parent of a child) in the 1990s, you are well acquainted with I Spy books. The search-and-find books for kids contained photographs of complicated still lifes and rhymes about the objects within them that the reader needed to find. While today we might make these as digital composites, all of these complicated photographs were created with real objects by photographer Walter Wick. He originally used an 8x10 view camera for intricate detail, but in 2004 he moved to high resolution digital. “I was very surprised at how intensely kids looked at my photographs. So I just put that same intensity back into them.” This short video by Insider delves into the history behind the I Spy phenomenon and takes us inside Wick’s incredible studio filled with blocks, toys, trinkets, and camera equipment.