Playdoh Prints 10

To celebrate the 70th anniversary of Magnum Photos, artist Eleanor Macnair has recreated 10 photographs from the photo agency’s history. Celebrated by the New York Times, Macnair is the founder of the ever-popular and much-lauded project, Photographs Rendered in Play-Doh, where she re-creates photographic icons in clay, and publishes the resulting sculptures to the internet. Macnair has been credited with helping to raise awareness of photography globally, and her Play-Doh project has been published as a book and exhibited globally, with a new show opening at the National Portrait Gallery in London in May 2017. A self-taught artist, Macnair's tools are amateur – off the shelf Play-Doh, a chopping board, a scalpel and an empty wine bottle as a rolling pin. After each sculpture is shot it is disassembled and the Play-Doh returned to respective pots to be used again for future renderings. In these images, created for Magnum Photos, the dark blue skyscrapers from the Elliot Erwitt became the waves in the sea in the Newsha Tavakolian, the background wall from the Chris-Steele Perkins became the handrail in the Bruce Davidson and the yellow balloon in the Thomas Dworzak became the blonde hair of the girl in the Martin Parr. The models no longer exist and the photographs are all that remain.