Eleanor MacNair’s *Whilst the World Sleeps* reconsiders photographic history through more than fifty images remade in Play-Doh. Published by RRB PhotoBooks in 2024, the book draws on an archive of nearly 400 recreations begun in 2013, bringing familiar photographs into proximity with images that have received less attention. MacNair’s transformation is more than a change of material: by turning photographs into brightly coloured, hand-shaped models, she asks how recognition, authority, and cultural value attach themselves to images.
The work’s method is deliberately ordinary and unusually disciplined. MacNair makes the models late at night with off-the-shelf Play-Doh, an empty wine bottle used as a rolling pin, a knife, and a chopping board. She then photographs them in natural light in her bin yard, repeatedly adjusting viewpoint and illumination before dismantling each object and returning the material to its containers. The resulting photographs hold together two states: the remembered image that serves as reference, and the temporary, tactile labour required to reconstruct it.
The project also addresses contemporary habits of looking. Initially circulated through Tumblr and Instagram, these recreations respond to the rapid consumption of photographs on screens, in newspapers, and in advertising. Their humour makes the work approachable, but the underlying questions are pointed: who is allowed to make art, what grants an image cultural legitimacy, and how far institutional language or production expense shapes our judgments. Play-Doh becomes a means of slowing attention and exposing the material assumptions behind photographic value.
This 80-page first-edition softcover presents a concentrated account of a project developed over more than a decade. For collectors, its importance lies in the precision of the premise and the consistency of its execution: photography is simultaneously source, subject, and object of critique. Each recreated image preserves the trace of something that existed only briefly, giving the book a distinctive position within contemporary photobook practice and debates about reproduction, memory, and the status of images.
