"Toy Soldiers..." Topic

… by Simon Brann Thorpe review – a powerful meditation on war.

"War photography might seem the least inappropriate genre to lend itself to a conceptual treatment, but artists as diverse as Sophie Ristelhueber and Broomberg and Chanarin have ruptured the traditional narrative of reportage in surprising ways. Ristelhueber's series Fait, made in 1991, presents monochrome images of the scarred surface of the Kuwaiti desert seven months after the first Gulf war. Craters, tyre marks and pieces of machinery and uniforms are photographed alongside high aerial shots of roads and abandoned military posts, giving the impression of an alien planet denuded of life after an apocalyptic endgame.

British duo Broomberg and Chanarin opted for an even more conceptual response by exposing a long roll of film to sunlight each time someone died in Afghanistan while they were embedded there with British troops in 2008. Their bright abstractions of light on paper are perhaps the most absurdist response to both the horrors of war and the cliches of a certain kind of macho photojournalism.

Now comes Simon Brann Thorpe's book Toy Soldiers, in which real soldiers pose in the exaggerated or static manner of their miniature model counterparts. That the conceit is not as daft in its execution as it sounds is down, to a great degree, to Thorpe's meticulous approach – in which the distance between the real and the staged is blurred to surreal, slightly ominous effect. There is something deathlike in his portraits: one young soldier stands, eyes closed, as if asleep or hypnotised; another poses with his hands – and rifle – raised as if shot by a sniper. Throughout, the sand and sky provide a natural backdrop that amplifies the unrealness…"
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Amicalement
Armand

"What went ye into the wilderness to see."

One must always consider the narcissism or the artist in the evaluation of the work. The subject of the art is the essential prototypical translation of a reality only superficially and mistakenly, almost unconsciously transmitted by a medium that is essentially blind to all things outward and focusing on all things inward in the self.

The patron of the work must enforce his requirements with knout, whip, and bastinado else all he will get from the artist is a self portrait.

Otherwise known as "Airfix Charades".