During my holiday shopping I stumbled across a game called OuiSi, described as “a set of 210 visually-connecting photo cards, with games and activities that foster creativity and ignite curiosity.” Of course it brought to mind Dear Friend, the photo penpal project my friend Donna and I had just wrapped up over the summer. I thought it might be something fun to do with the boys so I decided to check it out.
In the box is a deck of post-it sized photo cards, each one relating visually to several of the others in some way; it could be something straightforward like color, texture, or pattern, or something a bit more obscure like shape or shadow. It’s been incredible fun playing with my littles. Mostly we play collaboratively making crossword-style grids with the cards, connecting each image to the images adjoining it. Sometimes we draw cards at random and then go for a walk through the neighborhood looking for our own connecting images in the world around us, even using a camera to create photos. The connections the boys make are often surprising, and teach me so much about the way they see the world.
Around the same time I bought the game I also got back several rolls of film I had sent off to be developed, and had begun sorting through the photos. Perhaps it was how much we had been playing with the cards, but as I sifted through the images I couldn’t help but notice the connection between some of them. I started laying them out on my desktop playing with how certain images seemed to fit with others, often the images taken months or years apart and in locations that were hundreds of miles away from each other. The thing that was fascinating was how many different ways the same images could be sequenced. I settled on the order below, liking that if laid them out in a circle the last and first connect back again.
(To view them in a loop open the first image, then click the left or right side of the screen to scroll back and forth. If viewing on a phone you can tap to move forward or swipe either direction, however it will only let you scroll from end to end and will not allow you to swipe from the last photo back to the first.)
