Man Behind theI SpySeries, Photographer Walter Wick, Reveals the Secrets to His Whimsical Scenes (Exclusive)

Mar. 15, 2025

‘I Spy’ photographer Walter Wick.Photo:Walter Wick; Scholastic Press

Walter Wick; Scholastic Press

Made out of block toys, dominoes, sandbox toys, train tracks and other various kid-friendly gadgets, the contraption was an idea that Marzollo came up with and something that Wick, 71, ultimately designed in his studio. Looking back on his creation, the photographer tells PEOPLE his collaborator wasn’t initially concerned about its functionality.

“Jean said, ‘Well, you don’t have to really make it work,’ " Wick recalls, saying that the late writer — who died at age 75 in 2018 — would have been happy with a cool-looking machine. “She just thought I was gonna do some levers, ramps and pulleys in a scene, which would’ve been perfectly sufficient. But I decided to make this machine and I said, ‘Well, it’s gotta do something. What’s it gonna do?’ I said, ‘I think it’s gonna pop a balloon.’ "

“Levers, Ramps, and Pulleys” from ‘I Spy School Days’ (1995).Walter Wick

Walter Wick

“The first thing I did was figure out how to pop a balloon with a machine. I knew it had to be gravity-powered,” Wick recalls. “So I came up with this Tinkertoy stand that held the balloon and held the thing that popped it at the same time. And then I had a pulley and a string and a key with a key on it. And the key is important. That’s a hidden thing.”

While looking for the right key to include, the photographer and his assistant at the time went through boxes of props. “I said, ‘See what you can find in there.’ And he came out stroking the xylophone. So the xylophone became a ramp,” he says.

Eventually it all came together. But, of course, not without some trial and error — and a bit of a scare, with Wick revealing that he nearly injured himself with his popping device. “If the pencil wasn’t sharp enough, it would just bounce off the balloon,” he says. “So I sharpened it and then I accidentally triggered it and almost killed myself with it.”

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“City Blocks” from ‘I Spy Fantasy’ (1994).Walter Wick

Once the scene was published in the school-themed edition ofI Spyin 1995 and as the popularity of the books continued to grow, Wick and Mazollo started making appearances at schools across the country. And during those visits with young students, the photographer made it a point to ask them what the contraption did, and how it worked. “And they would run through the whole thing and that kid would be the hero of the assembly,” Wick shares.

Many of the props — particularly the wooden blocks — in “Levers, Ramps, and Pulleys” also appeared in “City Blocks,” which was part ofFantasy,released a year prior in 1994. In fact, it’s the moody cityscape made out of ABC blocks, tracks, toy cars and other hidden objects that is Wick’s favorite.

“I love this sort of mood,” he says of the golden hour-themed scene, which he credits to what he calls “magical lighting.” He adds, “It’s kinda world building, you know? This is world building that you yourself can build.”

And when building this particular scene, Wick says he wanted to “subvert the scale” and create “this kind of, almost, unresolvable scale difference between the blocks themselves and the toys.” And to do so, one of the everyday items he used was a stool — something that a kid might grab to help expand the city they’re building, while the photographer knew it would add a special dimension to the final image. “It’s just magical to me,” he says.

Cover of the first ‘I Spy’ book released in 1992.Scholastic Press

Scholastic Press

Another one that Wick has strong memories of making is"Into the Woods”(Fantasy), which came out of walks in the woods he would take with his dog after moving to Connecticut. “I brought in all these mosses and stuff into the studio. All this stuff came from the local woods,” he says, referring to forest scape, which is made of mosses, pine cones, logs and other natural materials.

“So, I love that because my wife came to the rescue,” Wick says.

Walter Wick in his studio with nearly 20,000 props used to create ‘I Spy’ scenes.Walter Wick

And it’s the romanticism, the whimsy, the nuance and sophistication that madeI Spya success within what Wick calls a “children’s book market saturated with search-and-find books at that time,” with a number of them being “these knockoffs” ofWhere’s Waldo, which was first published in 1987.

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“I started to develop narratives in a much more sophisticated way. So instead of in the balloon popper [scene], where you’re seeing within one shot the cause and effect of the objects and the motion of things, the entire book is a sequence of images that contains a hidden puzzle to solve,” he says of adding “layers upon layers of things to discover.”

Fans of Wick’s work on both children’s puzzle books can see select scenes from those series as well as models that inspired those photos and his other still-life photography at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa. The exhibit,Walter Wick: Hidden Wonders!, runs through Nov. 17, 2024.

TheI Spyseries fromScholastic Pressis currently available wherever books are sold. The newest editions,I Spy Christmas Treatswas released on Sept. 3, whileI Spy Lovewill be available starting Nov. 12.

source: people.com