BELLOWS FALLS — It's a rabbit.
No? A wabbit, maybe?
No. It's a Labbit.
And for a year, that Labbit may be living dangerously, lounging about the kitchen, in the blog, Year of the Labbit, dedicated, according to its transplanted Canadian author, to one photograph a day.
And vegetarian food recipes.
In that order.
Having never heard of a Labbit, the blog, or the blogger before my editor sent me the link with the subject line: “This is just so freakin' bizarre,” I finally tracked down the author, Jessica Day, and made contact. There is no secret; her name is attached to the blog.
That it was a local blogger was evident by some of the locations in the shots on the blog - the first Bellows Falls Farmers' Market of the season, Okemo Mountain car races, and trips to Connecticut from snowy Vermont, all observed from the point of view of a stylized, plastic, white rabbit figurine with an apparently active and interesting lifestyle.
But who this blogger was taking, most recently, intriguing photos of a “Labbit” named Pipkin, and found “oot and aboot” the local environs, in and out of state, begged discovery.
Jessica Day introduced me to the world of toy photography, a subject she became fascinated with soon after completing her fine arts degree in Toronto in 2001, and has made the focus of her blog.
“I love toy photography,” Day said. “There's something unexpected about seeing a toy outside of where you would normally expect to see them. And these aren't kids' toys. Some of them are one of a kind made by the artist for the shot.”
Labbits are produced by Kidrobot, a firm that describes its offerings as “a blend of sculpture and popular art,” priced from $5 to $25,000.
“Artists often create a series of only a few hundred to a few thousand pieces, so once a toy is sold out, it's sold out forever,” the company's website observes. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City (MoMA) holds 13 Kidrobot toys in its collection.
With a background in film, video, and screenwriting, Day explained the purpose of the blog.
“Have you ever heard of Project 365?” she asked.
I thought I hadn't heard her correctly.“You mean 350?” I asked, referring to the climate change activism project.
“No. Three-sixty-five. It's a project started to help photographers get over the hump to inspiration,” Day said, explaining daily photographic blogs designed to inspire and challenge photographers to take and share their work daily.
For the most part, Day has kept up, though she admits that she has missed a few days here and there.
“Another photographer friend who had started on New Years told me about it,” she said. “I didn't hear about it until a few months later.”
The blog's first post on Feb. 4 (begins with “Year of the Labbit Carrot Cake” celebrating the Chinese New Year that kicked off the Year of the Rabbit. The entry is deliciously illustrated with clear, colorful photos of the process of making a cake:a Labbit Cake, shaped like a Labbit, of course.
* * *
Day explained that her second goal in producing the blog was to provide recipes for her friends who wanted to cut down their consumption of meat and who were having trouble coming up with alternatives in their diet.
“They asked me for recipes, and I'm like, 'Are you kidding me? I have trouble coming up with meat recipes,'” she said, laughing.
So a blog was born.
Day's blog provides links to two of her favorite toy photography sites, “Little People: Abandoning Little People on the Streets Since 2006,” and “My Milk Toof: The Adventures of Ickle and Lardee,” two vastly different artists' takes on toy photography, that have nonetheless inspired Day's daily Labbit adventures.
In the Feb. 27 blog caption accompanying a cleverly composed photo of the black-and-white spotted Labbit named Theodore reading “Watership Down,” Day explained that Pipkin, Clover, and Captain Holly, three of the Bellows Falls Labbits, are characters from the Richard Adams story.
The three Labbits were originally created by artist Frank Kosik. Day explained she has at least nine Labbits of that size, as well as “a lot of smaller ones.”
“These are toys for collectors,” she said, pointing to the artist's signature scratched into the belly of Pipkin Labbit.
And they come with “accessories.” Pipkin sits on the table wearing a mustache, which is replaced by a pink tongue when it comes time for tasting the goodies of the restaurant we meet at.
Day's photographs of her Labbit in the blog by and large stand by themselves, but a one-line caption accompanying the photographs pulls the reader in, hinting at a story untold.
Day explains on the site, “The Labbit family is made of up of nine Kidrobot Labbits: three happy Labbits, a corpsman Labbit, and five little smorkin' Labbits. They come from different corners of the United States, but now call the little southern Vermont town of Bellows Falls their home.”
The more one knows, the more one wants to know.
And the more one talks with Day, the more what she's really about reveals itself.
Day says her real passion in photography is something called lomography - photos taken with a Lomo camera - an all-plastic camera, originally manufactured in Russia by a company of that name, one that is loosely based on the early “throwaways” Kodak put in the hands of families starting in the 50s.
These cameras produce “shoot from the hip” shots that, more often than not, are soft-focused and often have flaws where light gets into the lens or streaks when the film gets scratched.
All these aspects drew Day to lomography, defined by one website as “a global community whose strong passion is creative and experimental analogue film photography.” She is not alone.
“I don't like digital photography, where everything can be manipulated and everything is refined,” she said.
“I like the aesthetic of the '70s-looking photographs, the color and soft focus,” she said, pointing to an example of her work taken with her Lomo camera.
“They're compact and not too heavy to carry. You can take them with you everywhere,” Day said.
The cameras are anything but low-tech or inexpensive, with myriad lenses available and the body alone costing just under $100. They use 120 mm film that needs to be developed.
Day acknowledges that the plastic and chemicals needed to process the film are environmentally unfriendly. But she can't help it, she said: she likes the idea that she never really knows what she's going to get until the film is developed, and she can take her equipment with her anywhere.
But she explained she is doing digital photography now, because developing the Lomo film is beyond her means.
“At least I am doing photography,” she said.
* * *
Taking pictures of a Labbit in various locations and situations can bring attention to what she is doing, something she is not completely comfortable with yet. She admits that she can “hide behind the camera.”
But Day noted that creating the blog has forced her to get over that shyness and the judgmental part of herself.
That's the part where she tells herself that she “isn't good enough” or asks herself, “Who do you think you are?” That's the part where she compares herself to other toy-photographer bloggers.
Day said she is starting to be less shy, to loosen up, and to lose her self-consciousness. That change is starting to show up in other things she does like dancing and even the way she plays the piano.
“And that's really the point of Project 365,” she said.
“It's scary but freeing,” she said, and the blog project has forced her to “show up on the page” as it were, even when she doesn't feel like it.
“I try to get out there and do it,” she said.
The people who introduced her to the concept of daily photo blogging stopped, but she has kept at it.
“Sometimes I'll get in bed at night and tell my husband I haven't done a Labbit photo that day. He'll tell me, 'Go do one now,' and I have to get over the idea that it has to be something special or big every time. I just have to do it. It doesn't matter.”
“It's like any New Year's resolution – you can relapse. But you just get back on it again,” Day said with a smile.
She said she has hits on her blog from all over the world: Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, India, Norway, and Brazil are a few of the more exotic places, and “30 to 50 people a day” come by her blog.
“A lot of them come because of the recipes, but some because of the photography,” she said.
Day said she gets the rare response to her recipes telling her “that's really good” but has not had any direct response to her photography online.
Her friends and family are the ones who ask, “What is it about?”
“There's nothing really to get,” Day laughed. “It's a means for me to be doing [Project 365].”
And who knows? She might see a show will come out of it. It's art. You never know.
She said that by the time the project ends, after a year, she hopes she will enjoy a better sense of confidence in her photography, and in the process she will be inspired to get out there and do what inspires her.
“Perhaps my next project,” she said.