Photographer Jan von Holleben takes fun and imaginative
lying-on-the-floor photographs of 250 kids in a world where nothing is impossible.
A search-and-find book featuring KonradWimmel, his sister, and friends on an adventure-packed chase through town to find the thief who pinched the savings of Granny and Grandpa Wimmel. The premise seems exciting and simple. The production is anything but.
In this giant project, Jan von Holleben spent several months with 250 young students taking more than 5,000 photos. He combined the photos into a collage of seven main settings; a school, a park, traffic, an inventor’s fair, a sports field, a zoo, and a grand party. Each has two versions, the first one is full of teeming pictures and the second one is a zoom variation where you can look at the colorful photo collages more closely.
You can say that the objective is to find the main characters, but there are all sorts of other exciting things to look for, from crazy inventions to unique animals. “The inventor’s fair is my personal favorite,” Jan said, as it had always been his dream to invent important and fantastic machines.
The photographer and his assistant began with approaching a school and the kids, conducting workshops to involve them in the creative process right away. They discuss the craziest fantasies and received countless new ideas. Some kids even began planning their own parts in the big picture, like becoming an elephant or simply flying high with a handful of balloons.
There are 15 to 30 enthusiastic kids in each day of photo shooting, and you can imagine that it couldn’t have been easy. “The everyday challenge was to keep them happy on the floor and maintain and strengthen the relationship to every single child,” Jan admitted. But after everything is in place and the book is done, Jan felt like he never wanted to stop making pictures like these. “I have three more (books) in my mind already. If it works out, we will have to see, because of the exceptional size of this project. The possibilities are immense, and that’s the inspiring aspect about it!”
photos by
Jan von Holleben
