Yes, you read that right.  I want to speak today about toilet paper roll dioramas.  A diorama is a small scene created in a small place, like a ship in a bottle.  Small is actually not a requirement of the genre.  When I was a little boy – sorry more tales from the cretaceous – I loved to go the the American Museum of Natural History and when I got home I would use little wooden cheese boxes and plastic animal figures to create my own natural history scenes, or I would invert small plastic strawberry or blueberry containers from our local Pioneer Market to create little zoos.  A more complex contrivance was to take a cereal box, cut a square hole at one end, and an eye hole at the opposite end, and to string a comic strip between two pencils that would stretch across the square hole.  Hold it up to the light and you slowly wind the comic strip in succession and create a kind of miniature movie.

Carrying all these memories, I was delighted this week to come across the simply magical worlds of French Artist Anastassia Elias.  These are magnificent and complex dioramas each contained within the telescopic universe of a toilet paper roll.  Click on one of the images and then click on the right arrow to see a slide show.  I’ve decided that the photos are just as wonderful as the dioramas themselves, which makes it all fair game for Hati and Skoll.  Enjoy these little marvels that ultimately take us back to childhood, when anything was possible and all possibilities were magical.