AKTIVIST EXKLUSIV MAGAZINE
N*21 | 09 | 2004

Feature on Brian McCarty
by Agata Nowicka

(p. 48-49 English Translation)

> What have you been up to lately, Brian?
Lots and lots! I'm entering into the second year of being a fully independent photographer. Before now, I mostly worked for big companies like Mattel Toys, so it's exciting to be free to really work the way I want to work. I've been doing a lot for editorial clients and on personal series, but the real thrill has come from working directly with artists and toy designers that are on the cutting edge of the international "art toy" movement.

> Why toys? When and why did you decide they will make perfect models for your photo shoots?
Toys are amazingly powerful. As children, toys existed in a world laid on top of everyday reality. A park bench became an airport. A sandbox was a desert. The whole time we played, we were re-creating the larger world around us in smaller, safer bites. Toys and the art of playing gave room to explore some really difficult questions about what it means to be human. Friends, foes, love, death, life, family, country, and a million other complex questions about society and our place in it were simplified and yet intensified through playing. Toys acted as a sort of training wheels for being human.

Maybe I've never gotten past the training wheels phase of life. Toys are still how I connect to the world at large. The world is often so complex that I need something to pull me back to see the forest through the trees. Toys are it.

I have been using toys in my photography since seriously picking up a camera around age 11, but it wasn't until moving to New York that they came to dominate my work. Combine the sensory overload of NYC with truly being on my own for the first time at 17, and it makes sense that the safety net toys gave to me as a child really came back.

Over a decade later, and the toys are still here. I'm still trying to figure out a lot of things about all of us, the world, and myself, so I don't see them going anywhere anytime soon.

> It looks like, as a kid you must have preferred animated figure (toy) films to cartoons. If yes, what was your favourite series?
Actually, I was a total cartoon junkie! I now love the animated figure films, but there really weren't that many around when I was growing up. In Memphis, Tennessee in the 1980's there were only cartoons. I loved the typical stuff that was around (Scooby Do, Speed Racer, Justice League), but my world changed with one series - Robotech. Again bare in mind that Memphis was a conservative, southern, American city, so having a cartoon...

[continued on next page]