Following the question “How does somebody who spends 24/7 on the net look like?,” Christopher Kamper contacted three individuals he had only been in touch with online to meet them in real life and document their hobbies with photos. He visited a LARPer (someone practicing live action role-playing), an Otaku, and a Lolita (both Japanese subcultures). All three of these hobbies, even when practiced in real life, tend to stay more or less inside the rooms of their practitioners, yet are fueled by online communication on special message boards. The pictures showing the three adolescents document their alternate personas but also the topography of their rooms as their own little world. In these kids’ rooms, the computer becomes a key element for living out individuality and contact with peers.

In Real Life was conceived for paula roush’s 2008 class “Photographic Cultures. harnessing the power of self-publishing technologies for the creation and distribution of photobooks” at London South Bank University. Given the centrality of internet activity to self-publishing projects, roush put heavy emphasis on students using and designing the seminar’s and their own profile pages on the Lulu website as “storefronts” and exploring and using the Lulu community network to support their photo publishing practice with posts in the seminar’s blog, their own Lulu blog, reviews, feedback, and social bookmarking. As a result,* In Real Life* is one of the few books in our collection that received a review on Lulu.