You may have seen the account on Instagram: photos of colorful and symmetrical buildings and real-life places that evoke a sense of adventure and whimsy, scenes that make you go, “That could be in a Wes Anderson film.”
Accidentally Wes Anderson (@accidentallywesanderson on Instagram) was born from couple Wally and Amanda Koval’s desire to have a travel bucket list. But the list that was originally just meant for them quickly grew into an online Community (always with a capital “C,” says Wally) of nearly 2 million people. Now, the couple has just released their second Accidentally Wes Anderson book, Adventures, and are embarking on a road-trip-style tour to bookstores across the country in an RV with their dog, Dexter, including a stop in Cincinnati at Joseph-Beth Booksellers Monday.
Adventures is a coffee-table-style book in appearance, but delves much deeper than that in its pages, with vibrant photos that celebrate travel, design and exploration and the backstories behind each spot, sharing what makes them distinctly “Accidentally Wes Anderson.” CityBeat sat down with Wally ahead of his and Amanda’s stop in Cincinnati to learn more about the book:
CityBeat: I know you featured the Esquire Theatre on your Instagram. Are you going to visit it while you’re here?
Wally Koval: Yes, 100%. It’s really cool to be able to see these places that the Community have shared with us because we get so many submissions from so many awesome places, and rarely do we get to see all of them. We’re just a small team. We can only travel so much without it being overwhelming and so being able to see some of these places IRL is a treat. To being able to go up and look and be like, “Oh, yeah, it does look just like that!” Because these places like the Esquire Theatre — it looks magical. And I’m really pumped to be able to see that crazy facade … I can’t wait to be able to see that marquee.
CB: How was compiling and writing Adventures different than your first Accidentally Wes Anderson book?
WK: For one, this was a much more extensive process. So, the reason it’s called Adventures in the first place is because we have taken a note from the evolution of this project overall, and that’s what we did. For over the past four years, we’ve been super fortunate to go on adventures to Antarctica; we’ve gone to Korea; we’ve gone to Vermont; we’ve gone to the beaches of Delaware. We’ve gone to small and large, near and far.
I think the difference here, when we were compiling this — the first book was more fact-based entries, more Wikipedia-esque. More just general history. Some fun stories for sure. But this, as we have been able to venture out into the world and explore, we’ve met so many interesting people. We’ve learned their stories, them living in these communities and around these structures and we’ve just met some characters that we were able to really go and do a deep dive into, which makes this much more of an extensive, storytelling experience.
And what we were able to do this time was, in each chapter, there’s an adventure. There’s a bunch of smaller stories that are peppered with different photos, but then each one has kind of this tentpole moment within each chapter of an adventure. It’s like an eight to 10-page spread where we do a deep dive into the characters and places and fun facts and architecture and all of the things of a place.
And then where we weren’t able to go ourselves, we tapped the Community and they helped us fill in the blanks because we can’t be everywhere and this is very much a Community project. We started with about 100,000 photos and we whittled them down, somehow, to 200. So, it was a much more extensive starting point, and also, the bar from book No. 1 was set very high, and so we had to do our due diligence to make sure those stories and those places that we shared didn’t just live up to the hype but exceeded the things our Community was expecting from us.
CB: How did you whittle down 100,000 submissions to just 200? What were you looking for specifically?
WK: There’s a question of: What is AWA? We can go to when we were choosing the cover of the book and Wes Anderson came back to us and basically gave us one line, saying, “What I like about what you do is it’s not so much like what I do.” … We’re not recreating Mendl’s boxes; we’re not running through our videos in Life Aquatic outfits. We are turning the lens, this aesthetic, and searching in the world for really interesting places that, if you look at them from the right perspective, they exude a beauty that you didn’t necessarily know.
So, finding these places — There are certain fundamental things about these places — maybe they’re pastel, there’s a touch of nostalgia, there’s symmetry there — but even if none of those fundamentals from a photo perspective are there, it’s something that we always like to say, “You know it when you see it.” And it can be something completely asymmetrical, and maybe it has no pastels, and maybe it’s off-the-walls, but it fits. Why? I’m not quite sure. It’s got a little something that you can’t quite put your finger on.
And sure, you can start to chop a bunch here and there; it’s kind of easy in the beginning, but once you get down to about 2,000 photos, that’s when the real difficulty comes in. You’re looking at that point for the story. There’s one thing to capture your eye with a photo, but without digging into that underlying layer of what makes it interesting and unique, it’s not AWA. … It has to have an interesting or some unexpected story behind it.
CB: In your own words, what makes a photo or a scene in real life “Accidentally Wes Anderson?”
WK: I think it’s the small details. I think that it has to have some aspect of charm or something you weren’t quite expecting. But some of my favorite places that are AWA are the places that seem ordinary, but when you dig in, they’re extraordinary. And that’s accentuated by the fact that when we post these online, people write comments and say, “I walk past this building every single day, and I never expected to see it here, and I never knew the story behind it.” … Those kind of unexpected moments that kind of get somebody excited and thinking about their own neighborhood in a new way? Those are the most exciting ones for me.
CB: Both your Instagram page and your books have this whimsical sense of adventure and an encouragement to get out and explore and see the world in a different way. How do you hope Adventures encourages your audience to get out and explore the world, either at home or abroad?
WK: I think the beauty of it is that you can — there are aspects of this book that allow you to see it and the world in many different ways. You can buy the book and put it on your coffee table, and it’ll look pretty right there. You can pick that book up for a breath of fresh air and something that’s going to rouse your senses a little bit and flip through it and see the pretty pictures just from there. Or, you can dive into the stories and you can start to unearth these characters and discover new places and maybe even discover something in your backyard that you didn’t know.
But what my main hope is that, by flipping through these pages, you’re unearthing these stories you didn’t quite expect. That whether it’s a trip that’s far away, or maybe if you can’t go somewhere far away or if you have no desire to do so, you can now walk around your own Main Street or your own town and you can start to just see it and be interested in what else might be there, what other stories and what other people may have lived behind these halls and walls that you never had any idea about.
CB: Wes Anderson wrote the foreword for both of your books. How did you get him involved?
WK: We had been doing this project for a year and a half and then somebody had reached out to us and asked if we would be interested in doing a book, and we were super pumped about that idea because these photos and these stories deserve something more than this fleeting digital platform. And the catch was like, “Do you have Wes’ approval?” No. We’ve been operating in a gray area, so we wrote a bunch of letters, sent a bunch of emails, were able to get in touch with him and he graciously gave us his blessing to go out into the world and make this book. But he had final say, so at the end of it, when we sent him the final product we were crossing our fingers because he could have just redlined the whole thing. … Thankfully when we sent him the final product he agreed to pen the foreword, so that was really impactful for us and for the Community because we were able to see that he was really pumped about what we had created.
CB: Do you have a favorite photo or place in the new book?
WK: I’ll give you three that have just risen to the top for me. When you say photo, it’s tough, because it’s not just the photo. There’s a photo of a place in Jincumbilly, Australia. [Jincumbilly] is very small, as is the story. The story that we wrote is maybe four or five lines. And it is an old railway station that’s shut down. But the story of this place — why is it interesting? There are more platypuses than people that live in Jincumbilly.
In Vermont, there’s a library and an opera house that were built together. When the Canadian border was implemented and the border was set, a woman lived in a town that was kind of divided by the border. And she saw her community being broken up by an imaginary line, and she wanted to change that. So she set in place to commission and build a library and opera house that straddles the border of Canada and the United States. … There’s literally a line of tape down the middle because they have to have different insurance policies and all these things. But she was able to overcome that. That space is used for meetings of families who are on different sides of the border. They allow people to come in and meet and have conversations with one another. It’s a connecting point. And, in a fun way, we like to say any artist that plays at that theater can tout themselves as being on an international tour.
There’s places in Svalbard, which is the northernmost settlement before the North Pole. It’s a very cool thing, but it’s also interesting that there’s a vault there that has the recipe for Oreo cookies in it. Cats are illegal in Svalbard, and you can’t be born and you can’t die there because there is no hospitals and they won’t bury you there because of the permafrost. I’ll say those are my top three, or we’ll be here for another hour *laughs*.
CB: Is there anything else you’d like to share about Adventures or AWA?
WK: Just two things: One, first and foremost, submissions are always open. We take pride in every photo that comes in through our submissions on our website and we encourage the Community: You don’t have to be a professional photographer; if it looks interesting, we’ll take a peek at it. Your worldview helps shape the view of AWA and what is AWA.
To that point, it’s always Community with a capital “C.” Community is a proper noun in our book, and I say that time and time again, and I will continue to preach that. Because they are very much the most important part of this. Amanda and I are indebted to them and have so much respect and love for the nearly 2 million people [in our Community]. [At our first book tour stop in Brooklyn], getting to see 150, 200 people and hugging so many people and them sharing their own experiences of AWA … because they’re so inspired by what we’ve created — because we’re just normal people too; we don’t have a background in any of this stuff. None of this was calculated; we’re just here trying to share some beauty in the world. So, we’re looking forward to seeing a lot of people in Cincinnati and getting to meet some members and folks of the Community there.
Wally and Amanda Koval and their pup, Dexter, will be at Joseph-Beth Booksellers on Monday, Oct. 28 at 7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public, and you can RSVP here. Learn more about Accidentally Wes Anderson at their website.
Accidentally Wes Anderson: Adventures is available to buy through bookstores and online retailers now. More info: josephbeth.com.
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