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    Cameras become art with casings made from books, turtles, and an armadillo

    Cameras become art with casings made from books, turtles, and an armadillo

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    Cameras can come in many styles and formats, and photographers Nico Krebs and Taiyo Onorato have taken this idea to its strange and beautiful endpoint. In Camera Collection, cameras are deconstructed and put back together with new casings. But instead of plastic or metal, some cameras get a taxidermied armadillo or a turtle shell as a casing, while others are housed in horns or a stack of books. Elsewhere in the mix, you'll find a stone camera, a camera-headed mannequin, and a camera made from a stringed instrument.

    Pictures can be found at the artists' site spread across multiple galleries, but the cameras were mostly conceived for As Long As It Photographs / It Must Be A Camera, a two-part art book from 2011. In a 2012 interview with American Photo, Krebs and Onorato say that several of the cameras were functional, though they weren't often used for their intended purpose. "[The turtle camera] would work," for example, "although we never took any pictures with it! Maybe we'll do another edition of If It Photographs, and actually take more photos with the cameras."