Each of the portraits is made from a child’s toy, a cheap, nondescript plastic action figure. Each of the figures is equipped with generic badges, firearms, voice transmitters, handcuffs and other accessories. The face of each figure measures about 3/8 of an inch vertically. The enlargements are 24X36 inches. The images were exposed with a Nikon D810 camera using a 105 mm Micro-Nikkor lens in a makeshift outdoor studio in open shade. Depth of field was managed by focus stacking, with approximately 30-60 layers in each image. (For this bit of technical tedium I owe a debt to Art Suwansang, who helped me manage the structure of these huge files.) The original white background was removed and the gradient background and shadow in each image is false, rendered in Photoshop. The objective is always to reveal another little bit of the nature of our being, together.
