How did this project get started?
Rolls and Tubes Collective: As we went into the initial pandemic lockdown, we determined we would have our critique group meeting via Zoom. The day we were to meet virtually, Jenny texted the group prior to our meeting stating she had nothing to show. On a whim, Colleen texted the group suggesting everyone make a quick photograph from the history of photography using toilet paper. Because we all felt a little scattered with the state of the world, this prompt was an unexpected distraction. We met and screen-shared our very first work (note, we weren’t yet “Rolls and Tubes”), and they made us laugh so hard. We realized that it had been weeks since we had laughed at all. It was, indeed, a needed release, and we wanted to replicate that feeling — and we knew we had many more of these in us.
Christy was a latecomer by a week and blew the project wide open by leaving her home to make her first photograph, bringing a delicious, transgressive indulgence to the group of pictures. Christy states, “For that first photo, my daughter and I drove from Berkeley to San Francisco to re-create the [Josef] Koudelka image. I remember feeling so guilty for leaving the house. There was literally no one anywhere. San Francisco was a ghost town — which was made to stand in the middle of one of the busiest streets in the middle of the day even possible. It feels surreal.
How did you each choose which artists’ works to re-create?
Jenny: That very first day, I thought I had the best idea: Magritte’s “Ceci N’est Pas une Pipe.” I re-created it to “Ceci N’est Pas TP” only to realize that I had already screwed up because I had re-created a painting, not a photograph. Time was running out and I had to act fast. But who? One of my very favorites, Diane Arbus. But which one? “Twins.” It was so quickly thrown together, but it made me laugh.
Moving forward, I recognized that re-creating photographs using my hands and building sets and scenes with my rolls and tubes was meditative, and working in a more abstract and imperfect way was freeing. So I proceeded to find photographs that I thought I could build with my hands in some way, initially looking through every single photo book I owned and then over time migrating to the internet and being more deliberate about whose work to re-create.
Nicole: We choose artists who we respect and whose work we appreciate. We each had our own individual relationships to photography, and so our selections were decidedly different from one another. There were some instances of overlap, classics from the canon that could not be dismissed (ie, excellent, recognizable fodder for the project), but for the most part we each brought our own subjectivity to the work, and the artists chosen reflected our distinct backgrounds .
Colleen: I started with images that I had in my head already. From there, I turned to my photo book library. And this, too, was an exercise in getting lost in books I hadn’t paged through in a while. Later, I looked to the web, be it social media outlets for museums, remote Zoom lectures, or browsing New York dealers. I occasionally suggested an image to one of the others, and likewise a couple were suggested to me. I was also aware as we kept passing the days making these images how very full my library was of male photographers. So I began willfully including more women than the history I had been trained in provided.
Christy: I wanted to re-create images from photographers I admire and who have inspired my work, so this means documentary and street photographers. I utilized my personal photobook library, the internet, social media, and friends to find images. Colleen was an invaluable resource as she was always sending me random ideas and photographers to look at. As for choosing a photographer and photograph to do, it really comes down to whether or not the image has something in it that could be represented in some way with a roll of toilet paper. There were many, many photographers I didn’t choose because I either couldn’t see toilet paper in the photograph or the subject matter didn’t lend itself to being reduced to toilet paper.