Why Miniatures? Part 4 – Marwencol & Toy Place

Unable to afford therapy, Mark decided to create his own. In his backyard, he built Marwencol, a 1/6th scale World War II-era town that he populated with dolls representing his friends, family, and even his attackers. He used the small dolls and props to redevelop his hand-eye coordination, while he dealt with the psychological trauma from his attack through the town’s many battles and dramas.

Mark started documenting his miniature dramas with his camera. Through Mark’s lens, these were no longer dolls — they were living, breathing characters in an epic WWII story full of violence, jealousy, longing, and revenge. And he (or rather his alter ego, Captain Hogancamp) was the hero.

When Mark’s stunningly realistic photos are discovered and published in an art magazine, his homemade therapy suddenly becomes “art,” forcing Mark to make a choice between the safety of his fictional town and the real world he’s avoided since his attack.

Shot over the course of four years, Jeff Malmberg’s documentary intertwines the dual realities of Mark Hogancamp to tell the whole story of Marwencol — a surprising tale of love, secrets, pain, and adventure.”

So let’s get into it…

• “My memories I do get, they come back in stills.”
• “What’s the first thing I gotta work on? That’s my imagination.”
• “This is how I work on patience. This is how I work on dexterity.”
• “I know what it’s like to build things in miniature and want to have a society, outside of society. Smaller society.”
• “There’s one major difference I found immediately between Mark’s work and a lot of other contemporary art that I look at and see, and life for that matter. That is, particularly when you’re using dolls or some kind of – you’re photographing something, there’s generally a very strong sense of irony in the work. There’s a distance. And it’s kind of a little wink-winky like, I’m photographing dolls. Isn’t that, you know, funny or subversive or clever or whatever. And I just – the thing that struck me immediately about Mark’s work is that there’s no irony in it as far as I can tell. I mean, he’s a very clever guy, very smart, but he’s in the work. He’s not using the work as a tool to do something else. The work is him. It’s a very authentic feeling to me.”
• “Courage is to face the thing, do the thing, even though I have such great fear of doing it.”
• “Everybody wishes they could have a double and could do things they could never do.”