Colette Fu constructs intricate pop-up books out of her photographs. Image: Colette Fu Her most recent series, "We Are Tiger Dragon People," looks at the minorities in China's Yunnan Province. Image: Colette Fu Each single-page pop-up book tells a narrative. This particular book is about the food of the Dai people. Image: Colette Fu When shooting for her books, Fu avoids shadows, and likes to shoot straight-on full-body shots for maximum flexibility. Image: Colette Fu Up to 20 different photos can be used in a single book. Image: Colette Fu To give you a sense of scale, her "We Are Tiger Dragon People" pop-up books are 36x53 inches when fully opened. Image: Colette Fu “I always like to do things with my hands and make things, and I was always good at math,” says Fu. Image: Colette Fu This helped her with the more technical aspects of crafting the pop-ups. Image: Colette Fu Fu says her pop-ups get people to look at subject matter that they typically wouldn't look at otherwise. Image: Colette Fu

The first pop-up books were decidedly not for children. Created by physicists, philosophers and astronomers to demonstrate their theories and concepts, the books were more scientific tool than bedtime story. But what works for illustrating cosmic theories can certainly work for illustrating The Wizard of Oz, so along the way, the mechanics of the first pop-up books were re-appropriated as entertainment.

Colette Fu has been making pop-up books for the better part of five years. The Philadelphia-based artist brings her photography to life by adding traditional moveable book mechanisms like pull tabs, rotating disks and complicated folds. She’s made pop-ups about her travels, done work for commercial clients like Sephora and documented oddball places like the National Museum of Roller Skating in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Her most recent series, “We Are the Tiger Dragon People,” is a deep dive into the world of China’s Yunnan Province, an area of China where 25 of the country's total 55 minority tribes reside. Since 2008 Fu, who has roots in Yunnan, has documented the minority tribes in the region, and returned home to translate those photographs into intricate, 3-D books that tell the story of her subjects.

>Fu says she uses up to 20 photos to create the scenes.

When shooting for her books, Fu avoids shadows and likes to shoot straight-on full-body shots for maximum flexibility: "Just in case I need an arm later,” she explains. She then lays out all of the photos in Photoshop, tweaking and arranging their position to get the desired effect. The backgrounds of her single-page books are often a collage of photos taken on a particular day, while the actual pop-up mechanisms are printed, cut and folded into the 3-D features you see.

Fu says she uses up to 20 photos to create the scenes in her 36x53 inch books, adding that making pop-up books is a lot like putting together a a puzzle. Sometimes you have to shift the angles of the photos or add another layer to get the visuals just right. “Once I have it in pop-up form, I’ll see what’s missing,” she says.

Back when Fu was just starting out as a photographer, she recalls going to bookstores for inspiration. “Originally, I wanted to make something like the game of Life but with photos,” she says. Next to the shelf of games at her local Borders, she noticed a collection of pop-up books, that included Robert Sabuda's detailed masterpieces.

"I didn’t know there were these complicated pop-up books,” she says. “It was amazing.” Fu began ordering books on eBay, deconstructing them to learn about their mechanisms. The paper engineering came naturally. “I always like to do things with my hands and make things, and I was always good at math,” she says. She began toying around with her own photographs and quickly realized pop-up books were an excellent way to really tell a story. "It gets people to look at things they wouldn’t normally be interested in looking at,” she says.

[Hat tip: Visual News]