Tracy Marshall-Grant considers…Martin Parr’s New Brighton in Play-Doh by Eleanor Macnair
This is one of the most fun projects in photography right now, and by one of my favourite people in photography too, so it was an absolute given that I would choose an image for this column from the new book Whilst the World Sleeps by Eleanor Macnair.
Eleanor is a photographer and artist who began her Photographs Rendered in Play-Doh series in 2013 during a pub quiz. Inspired by the artists MacDonaldStrand – who also wrote the text to accompany her new book – to progress the images beyond being just an experiment, she published them in 2014 and soon began to amass a large audience and an archive of over 400 images. She has since been exhibited internationally and in 2017 was invited to create a series from the National Portrait Gallery collections for their bookshop gallery in London.
The images in this new book were created late at night while Macnair’s young toddler son slept and include rendering of images by Cindy Sherman, Elliott Erwitt, Gordon Parks, Chris Killip and Mary Ellen Mark among many more. For me, though, I had to select this one by Martin Parr from his New Brighton series – The Last Resort. Having worked with the real version of this image many times and shown it as a key picture during an exhibition in
New Brighton itself, I know the image so well it felt the right choice for this column.
Replicating colour
Macnair replicates the strong turquoise blues of the Irish Sea from this Merseyside resort so well in this image – they are almost identical to that of the original picture. The children with their ice creams, their expressions, the very sense of the harsh seaside wind blowing their hair – it is all there, rendered in bright Play-Doh colours, just as clearly as it is inthe image they represent. I am particularly fond of the children’s knees, battered from a day out at the sea, marked with scuffs and sand equally. I challenge anyone who has the actual picture in a book in their house to run and get it now and set it
