Wallflowers Press is designing a 300+ page book on the Histories of Newark: 1758-2008. We got a nice writeup in the Wilmington News Journal. The bike riders featured are worth a bit of the story.

As the ‘citizen photos’ part of the project was just getting started we hadn’t had a lot of publicity or word-of-mouth advertising happening. We had gotten the Wilmington News Journal to send down a reporter and a photographer on Friday, April 30 (our first day of shooting). They came at 5:00.

And it was dead at the photoshoot when the News Journal got there.

Ray was standing outside trying to find anyone to come in and be in a photograph. All of a sudden a group of about 25 bicyclists were coming down the street and holding up traffic. They took up the complete width of Main Street. Ray walked out and tried to talk with them while they rode by trying to get them to come in to do a photo. Not much enthusiasm for it at that point.

About 20 minutes later and our photoshoot was still just as dead the group circled back down the street in front of the building we were were holding the photoshoot. This time Ray went right out into the middle of the street to force them to listen to his story. “Be in the photograph and we’ll promote your cause.”

So they came in. We think the article pays off the promotion promise. Their group is called “Critical Mass.”

The design we did for the Histories of Newark: 1758-2008 has a 1″ strip that we want to run through the middle every page of book to give the book an extra bit of humanity. Here is how it will look.

We are planning to photograph at least 3,000 citizens. Over the first day we got exactly 100 to agree. It might take us a bit of time to get the word out so it isn’t as much work to get people to participate. Here are 8 of our favorites from the first day of shooting.

We will be shooting at the former CVS building at 108 East Main Street in Newark from Noon - 8:00 pm every FRIDAY and SATURDAY through May 5. PLEASE come by and bring a group with you. Choir, fraternity, football team (uniforms would be great), Brownies troop, families, dogs, of course bikes, etc.

This was a group of activists riding through the streets of Newark on their bikes and rollerblades to heighten awareness for the need for alternatives to gasoline powered transportation.

We had a Wilmington News Journal reporter and photographer at our photoshoot and things were completely dead. No one. Then we see this group slowing down traffic (actually they were probably keeping up as well as anyone) and we flagged them down with the promise that “We can promote your cause.” It was a pretty amazing moment. We think the News Journal will do a story just on them.

We were giving out suckers so we just threw the bag in front of a group of four and they threw them in the air.

Anytime people were a couple we asked that they look like it. These two did that quite nicely.

A 4-H group was planting flowers in front of the Post Office just down the street and stopped in, wheelbarrows, shovels, petunias, dog and all.

“So, what can we do?” “We could jump.”

Two U of DE students stopped in right after their yoga class. A bit of talk and voila.

This guy had been hiking the Appalachian Trail and had fallen and had a serious buise he wanted to show us.

The last guy just had his iPod on and broke into an iPod commercial.

100 down. 2,900 to go.

A nice design element we’ve built into the Histories of Newark book is a 1″ strip that runs horizontally through the entire book with full length portraits of people who live or work in Newark. This is the poster we printed to put up around town to encourage people to come and have their picture taken.

It took seven runs to do the poster. The colored lines were done about 7 at a time and were handrolled using three different colors each run. The type was a photopolymer and the white background was MDF.

Size: 15″ x 21″

This is the front and back of a postcard we letterpressed which we are mailing out to Newark residents to try and get them to be photographed for the Histories of Newark: 1758-2008 book which Wallflowers Press is designing. The front image shows a general layout with the 1″ strip of people photographs. We hope to photograph at least 3,000.

If you are reading this and either work or live in Newark, Delaware we are shooting photographs on Fridays and Saturdays from March 30th until May 5th from Noon until 8:00 pm. Just stop in. Bring something with you that represents you and dress for you and not the weather.

Ray Nichols and Jill Cypher of Wallflowers Press (now Lead Graffiti) have accepted an offer from the city of Newark to design a book celebrating its 250th anniversary (1758-2008). The book is scheduled to be published in the fall of 2007.

This is a link to our blog entry about the final book.

You can also see the deluxe edition in our portfolio.