What do Pieter Hugo and Madame Yévonde have in common? At first glance, not much, but they are both featured on a blog that reproduces well-known photographs using the modeling clay Play-doh.
In the Play-doh version, the man on Hugo’s photo stands proud, his fist clenched, a muzzled hyena standing on its hind legs and pressing against his body. He sports a fashionable pink tunic and a royal-blue bandana that Diana Ross might have worn in the heyday of disco. On the blog Photographs Rendered in Play-doh (http://photographsrenderedinplaydoh.tumblr.com), the color palette is reduced, relying mainly on loud primary colors. Black-and-white photographs are colorized. For example, an Henri Cartier-Bresson photograph taken in Romania showing a young couple sleeping on a train becomes a color explosion of Klein blue and mustard yellow.
The person behind the blog must have invested in a few more jars of Play-doh recently, since the range of colors now includes turquoise and orange. This expansion may owe itself to the Tumblr’s success. Now followers can even make requests, and work by Wolfgang Tillmans, Norman Parkinson and Alec Soth have already received the Play-doh treatment. Every Play-doh reproduction links to the original photography, although in most cases the image is immediately recognizable.
Eleanor MacNair is behind the blog. She works at the White Cube gallery in London and spends her spare time experimenting with Play-doh. One imagines her to be a photography lover who chose to declare her love a little playfully. Her latest creation is a tribute to the late Saul Leiter, offering colorful new pop interpretation of his photograph “Sunday Morning.”
