WAR TOYS: Photographer Brian McCarty Travels to War Zones & Refugee Camps To Communicate Children’s Stories When Words Fail
ABOVE: Gaza Cinderella, Northern Gaza Strip, 2012
“Although her drawing is filled with soldiers, helicopters, and tanks, “Amara” only spoke about her intense fear of missile strikes. When a building or other structure is targeted in Gaza, it is often hit with a barrage of several missiles to ensure its complete destruction. The sound of successive hits is well known to children living in the territory. Amara made her drawing during an art-based interview at the UNRWA-run Asma Elementary School in Gaza City in 2012.”
Pondering the work of Brian McCarty, it’s difficult to imagine a poetic idiom that is less clarifying of the human condition than child’s play. Far from insignificant or easily done, McCarty’s version of child’s play is a hard-won reflection of the unconscionable: a cluster of missiles raining down on Cinderella; a toy tank and green army men holding a family in their line of fire; a dollhouse engulfed in flames, melting before a helpless girl doll; a boy with impossibly long arms plucking a missile from the air; a toy helicopter chasing down a girl in hijab; an eyeless toy boy standing in a pool of water reflecting the Dome of the Rock; a woman in an abaya carrying a baby doll out of bombed out building; a woman with a painted smile and stiff plastic hands being stoned.
Play is always a complex realm of shadow a light, a mirror-world where children explore the conflicting sides of human nature and the inconsistent corners of reality. But in regions plagued by war, it is a critical pathway, a method for exerting control over the terrible, a robust and flexible superpower of human imagination. Through play, children create worlds they can master; they practice skills and strengthen neural connections; they explore their fears and grapple with memories; they organize their feelings and find ways to express that which is inexpressible; in short, they find ways to cope.
Brian McCarty knew this going in. He had done exhaustive research. He had sought and received the counsel of numerous experts. He had reached out to Dr. Judith A. Rubin, a woman some of us will forever know as the “Art Lady” on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, but who McCarty knows better as a pioneer in the field of art therapy. He had followed all the suggestions. He had read all the books. He felt ready.
“Of course, everything goes out the window the first time you see a little girl coloring in pools of blood,” states McCarty.
McCarty’s first time took place in 2011 at the Spafford Children’s Center, a ninety-three-year-old not-for-profit organization in East Jerusalem which provides medical and psychological services to underserved children from the West Bank. McCarty had come to collaborate. Working through Spafford’s psychotherapists, the children were invited to share their experiences and unique perspectives through drawings which McCarty would turn into photographs. No one knew where the project would go but the work was significant. It communicated children’s stories when words had failed.
Of course, everything goes out the window the first time you see a little girl coloring in pools of blood.”
ABOVE: Gunned Down, Hassansham, Iraq, 2017
“At a child friendly space run by TdH Italia inside the Debaga IDP Camp, a young boy named Uday drew about a helicopter very specifically shooting a girl in the head. He didn’t want to share any more details about the event or other elements in the drawing with Art Therapist Myra Saad, but it is likely a representation of how his sister died. The toy doll and helicopter were found nearby, inside the Central Bazaar in Erbil”.
ABOVE LEFT: Stoned to Death, Hassansham, Iraq, 2017
“It’s not immediately apparent from her drawing, but an Iraqi girl named Zaina is sharing an account of watching a woman being stoned to death for not wearing approved attire under ISIS rule. In an art-based interview conducted with support from TdH Italia inside an IDP Camp near Mosul, Zaina first drew a woman at the bottom of the page, the outline of her can still be seen despite the stones that Zaina later covered her with. Revealing the story to Art Therapist Myra Saad, Zaina said that she’d like to give the stoned woman a flower and proceeded to draw one on top and fill in colors to cover up the scene of death. The resulting photo focused on the stoning and was created in the deserted and largely destroyed town just outside of the girl’s camp, located approximately 30km from Mosul.”
ABOVE: Suicide Car Bomber, East Mosul, Iraq, 2017
“Inside the Hassansham IDP Camp, at a Child Friendly Space provided by TdH Italia and UNICEF, a young girl named “Shadiya” made a drawing of what she said was a Daesh soldier placing a bomb onto a car. She then violently filled the page with orange and yellow scribbles that covered the vehicle and figure, showing an explosion. Days later, the girl’s account was recreated in East Mosul using locally found toys that were placed, posed, and set ablaze in shards of glass from a building destroyed by a suicide car bomber. A young militant, not too much older than the children in the camp, had driven a car loaded with explosives into the frontlines of Iraqi forces trying to retake the city from ISIS”.
ABOVE: Mother of Violence, Northern Gaza Strip, 2012
“A bootleg Fulla doll holds a generic plastic girl that can be found in most warzones and dollar stores alike. The photo is based on a drawing by “Karima,” a Palestinian girl attending an UNRWA-run elementary school in Gaza City. A large number of children created drawings that were similar to Karima’s. There is recurring iconography – olive trees, keys, flags, walls – that symbolize deeply held beliefs and issues at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, the truly common thread seen from children, regardless of the conflict, is the de-emphasis of important, personal elements inside of their drawings. Hiding within Karima’s chaotic scene is a mother holding a child, afraid of the fighting.”
“I don’t remember the Eureka moment when I thought, I’m gonna let the kids art direct my work,” says McCarty, “but I do remember the first time I voiced it aloud.”
It was 2010. McCarty’s first monograph had just been published by Los Angeles-based Baby Tattoo. Capturing the energy and brilliance of the Urban Vinyl movement as no other book had, Art-Toys: Photographs by Brian McCarty was a genre-defining triumph.
In the preface, renowned media theorist and documentarian Douglas Rushkoff wrote, “Make no mistake about it: the art world, the traditional art world is over.”
McCarty had been immersed in the world of art-toys since he left Mattel Toys in 2002. Collaborating with designers who shared his nuanced vision, he staged elaborate still-life photographs that positioned art-toys, through forced perspective, in real-world settings: Yoskay Yamamoto’s Koibito walking on the bottom of a sun-dappled pool with a hazy skinny-dipper in the distance; Aaron Tompkins’ Swear Bear looking tough between the blurred tires of speeding New York taxicabs; Tim Biskup’s sweet, gun-toting Tigerlily in a dry lake bed next to a burning car. The results were emotionally complex moments, filled with drama, humor, adventure, and calamity—leading Attaboy to, only half-jokingly, refer to McCarty as the Annie Leibovitz of art-toys.
Unsurprisingly, McCarty got a spread in the first issue of Hi-Fructose—and the cover. His work was also included in Pasadena Museum of California Art’s groundbreaking exhibit Beyond Ultraman: Seven Artists Explore the Vinyl Frontier—not to mention everything from Three Apples: An Exhibition Celebrating 35 Years of Hello Kitty to MANIFEST HOPE: DC Gallery, an inauguration event that celebrated Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 (McCarty’s widely published photograph captured Jason Feinberg’s Obama action figure outside the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King was assassinated). With the release of McCarty’s book and the ever-growing appeal of art-toys, he seemed uniquely positioned to ride a fun-filled, color saturated wave.
If people aren’t given the chance to process trauma, if people don’t talk about things the way they really are, we’re just setting up the next generation of kids for the next war,”
ABOVE: Tel Aviv Bus Bombing, Tel Aviv, Israel, 2012
“The AMIT Torani Mada’i School in Sderot had just reopened when 10-year-old “Moshe” was interviewed. He had been displaced with his family during an 8-day escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict known as “Operation Pillar of Defense.” At the top, Moshe’s drawing shows rockets from Gaza intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome defense system, but on the bottom, he drew a bus blowing up, showing his lingering fears. A few days before, a bus had exploded in Tel Aviv. It’s the first that he was old enough to be aware of, and the actual location was used in the subsequent toy photo”.
Instead, when Paul Vester, Co-Director of the Program in Experimental Animation at CalArts, turned to McCarty and asked, “What’s next?” McCarty began to talk about WAR-TOYS.
“He was the first person I told,” muses McCarty. “I thought he was going to say I was crazy.”
Instead, Vester knew exactly how to help.
A year later, working with the Spafford Children’s Center which Vester’s family originally founded, McCarty found himself belly-down in the dirt next to the barrier wall, just past the volatile Qalandia checkpoint. Armed with a bag of cheap green army men from an Arab-owned shop in East Jerusalem and a bright plastic boy from a Jewish-owned toy store in West Jerusalem, McCarty began to carefully reconstruct a very graphic drawing by one of his young collaborators: soldiers near this very place, shooting another little boy in the head. Completely absorbed in the work, McCarty barely registered the noise of protesters gathering at the checkpoint. Even as tear gas and stun grenades were shot into the crowd, his eye remained fixed on his camera’s viewfinder. In that moment, the only thing that mattered was bringing that boy’s story to life.
Brian McCarty grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. Like lots of kids, he remembers spending hours sprawled out on his bedroom floor, moving troops of plastic army men across a landscape constructed from bunched up dirty laundry and Legos. He remembers obsessing over the Men at Work music video “It’s a Mistake,” with its stop-motion sequences and die-cast Eagle Force figures. He owned them. He owned lots of toys—Transformers, Power Rangers, and G.I. Joe. Around the age of twelve, he discovered photography, and found that taking pictures of toys was a pretty good excuse to keep buying toys. By fifteen, McCarty had converted part of his mother’s carport into a studio. In 1996, he graduated from Parsons School of Design, and earned a grant from Benneton which immediately took him to Italy. He was invited to participate in KON©EPT, the first major photographic exhibition staged in Zagreb after the Croatian War of Independence. It would prove foundational.
…if they are seeing toys their own children might play with—they can’t dismiss the situation as something that happens to those people over there…”
ABOVE: Child Prisoner, Northern Iraq, 2017
“‘Yusef’ first drew what he said were a ladybug and Spongebob Squarepants at the top of the page. At the bottom he then made a drawing of the ISIS prison in Northern Iraq where he was taken from his family, beaten, tortured, and crowded in with other young boys. Some had been accused of crimes; most were just the sons or relatives of policemen and others deemed a threat to the Islamic State. They imprisoned the boys to get their families to comply, to teach a lesson to anyone that would dare oppose them.”
ABOVE: Mosque Destroyed, Hassansham, Iraq, 2017
“During the war against ISIS in Iraq there were several documented incidents of airstrikes hitting mosques in places like Mosul and Daquq. “Ali’s” cousin and uncle were caught in one of these incidents while at prayer. It’s unclear if they survived. Ali placed himself in the scene, tending to his garden and watering a flower. To the art therapist, it was a sign of his resilience”.
“Look, no one thinks they’re the bad guy,” says McCarty. “No one is sitting there, twisting their mustache, thinking they are the bad guy. Everyone thinks they are doing the right thing, the good thing. It’s a harder truth than we may want to accept. But, at the end of the day, we’re all just folks trying to find purpose in the world. That’s what this work as taught me.”
Fortunately, there are those who understand the WAR-TOYS message. Last year, the NEA-funded Mid America Arts Alliance launched a five-year-long traveling exhibition of WAR-TOYS photographs, drawings, and artifacts. The much-respected Aftermath Project named WAR-TOYS a finalist for a grant previously allocated to traditional documentary work only. This year, McCarty received his first commission based on the WAR-TOYS process—a twelve-photograph series for the UN’s International Organization for Migration. He also received a grant through the Fulbright Specialist Program to travel to Hong Kong to collaborate with PolyPlay on more positive designs for off-market military toys.
“Just producing a couple of civilians to throw into every bag of green army men would make a huge difference in the play pattern of children in crisis areas,” says McCarty. “That’s something we can do.”
Then it’s back to work.
“Honestly, I feel like I could work on this for the rest of my life,” says McCarty. “There’s certainly no shortage of war zones.*
This article first appeared in Hi-fructose Issue 43 which is sold out. In the years since this piece was first published, Brian founded the War Toys nonprofit organization to expand the project and impact more children. They are continuing the advocacy work of the photo series while developing some revolutionary programs to educate and inspire change on a global scale. This includes an ambitious toy industry initiative that will benefit millions of children worldwide.
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ABOVE: Sderot Home, Sderot, Israel, 2012
“When interviewed, “Uri” had been living in Sderot Community Shelter #36 for more than a week. His drawing was made on the morning of 22 November 2012 in the first few hours of a ceasefire that ended “Operation Pillar of Defense.” During the relatively brief escalation of the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israeli forces destroyed approximately 1500 targets within Gaza, and militants within Gaza fired 1456 rockets and mortars into Israel, many landing in or nearby the town of Sderot. The town with its close proximity to Gaza is a frequent target, so much so that a network of underground community bunkers protect citizens. Uri drew about the seemingly countless rockets that he imagined falling on his home. Many other children created drawings with similar themes.”
BELOW: Rainbow, Chernigiv, Ukraine, August 2022
“‘This is a story of how Ukraine won.’ In her drawing, 7-year-old Alisa imagines a bright and happy future centered around a soldier who has returned home, according to her, “healthy and alive.” With so many adults off fighting the war and Alisa not wanting to share more details, it’s hard to know exactly who she’s picturing in this scene, but it’s understood to be a close member of her family, likely her father. The effect of his absence is clear in her drawing. Alisa spoke about the water being trapped underground during the war, only now surfacing to feed the trees, flowers, and a rainbow. The therapists’ interpretation is that she believes her world cannot be happy again until this unknown soldier returns. Until then, he carries Alisa’s hope to get him through this war and back home to her.”
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