I’ve become a book cover!

Cover of "Tongue party" by Sarah Rose Etter
Cover of Tongue party by Sarah Rose Etter

Actually, I helped a piece of Jess Larson’s wonderful art become the central component of a book cover, but let us not quibble.

As patient, long-time readers might know/remember, Jess Larson makes very cool art, including a fantastic series of girdles from several years back. There was a showing of her girdles at the PRCA back in 2006, and I had the chance to carefully photograph the show, posting many of the results on Flickr.

Zip ahead several years, and one of these photos caught the eye of the folks at Caketrain as they were looking for ideas for the cover of a new book they were publishing: Tongue party by Sarah Rose Etter. Some e-mails were traded, etc., etc., and Jess and I both happily agreed to have our work (her girdle, my photo of it) used for their cover.

My original photo of Jess Larson's girdle as posted on Flickr
"A tongue tied in knots" (My original photo of Jess's girdle as posted on Flickr)

One of the unexpected little treasures that was waiting for us when we got home from Arkansas this week was my copy of the book, and the cover (pictured above) is really wonderful. I love the texture they added as the background and the way they’ve incorporated the text. I haven’t actually read the thing yet, but the pre-press blurbs certainly sound wonderful and I look forward to adding it to my summer reading list!

Thanks to Jess for making such cool art, giving me such nifty things to take pictures of, and being generous about the use of her art in this new context. Thanks also to the kind folks at Caketrain for seeing the work and getting in touch, and for making such a cool cover out of it all. This is another neat example of the value of sharing work on-line with tools such as Flickr; without that none of this would have been possible. I’m not getting paid anything beyond my free copy of the book, but now a whole new set of people will see Jess’s art and my photography, and that’s quite fine in my humble opinion.

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Holy Crap! Over 5,000 views in one day!

A student shows off her work to the judges in the 2010 UMM Fashion Trashion show
A student shows off her work to the judges in the 2010 UMM Fashion Trashion show

Friday was the second annual Fashion Trashion show, where a number of UMM’s Studio Art students grace the runway modeling outfits they’ve constructed primarily from recycled, reclaimed, and re-used materials. Jess Larson was kind enough to ask me to take pictures again (I shot the first show last year).

I did indeed take a bunch of photos, and posted just over 600 of the least blurry of them on Flickr yesterday. This is no big deal – I do lots of events and post piles of photos like this all the time.

Except this time the view count just went totally through the roof. My events account typically gets a few hundred views a day, with small spikes when I post a new set. 1,000 views, though, would be a big day for that account.

I’ve had over 5,000 views today, the vast majority of which have been on the Fashion Trashion photos.

Graph showing the huge spike in views in the last day
A bit of a spike in views, eh?

I’m quite thoroughly gobsmacked, and not entirely sure where all the traffic is coming from. I’m thinking a lot of it is via Twitter, but it’s not really clear.

I suspect that the total lifetime views of my photographs pre-digital/Flickr might have been than 5,000, so to have 5,000 views of my work in one day is pretty amazing. I’m most grateful for the attention – thanks!

Flickr’s “day” just rolled over, and we peaked at 5,600 views for the 24 hour period. I’ve probably never seen anything close to that, and may never again. Crazy.

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