Plastic, War, and the Drawings of Children

Brian McCarty photographs toys. That sentence doesn’t prepare you for what the work actually looks like. His War Toys series takes him to conflict zones—Lebanon, the West Bank, Gaza—where he collects drawings made by local children depicting what they’ve witnessed: airstrikes, rubble, soldiers, things on fire. Then he stages photographs using action figures and dolls to recreate those scenes in the actual locations. A plastic tank in a real blast crater. A GI Joe silhouette against a sky that has seen actual missiles. The gap between the medium and the subject is where the work lives—that cognitive dissonance between the cheerful consumerism of the toy and the weight of what it’s being asked to represent. Children process trauma through play; McCarty makes that visible and forces everyone else to sit inside it.