Instead, when Paul Vester, Co-Director of the Program in Experimental Animation at CalArts, turned to McCarty and asked, “What’s next?” McCarty began to talk about WAR-TOYS.
“He was the first person I told,” muses McCarty. “I thought he was going to say I was crazy.”
Instead, Vester knew exactly how to help.
A year later, working with the Spafford Children’s Center which Vester’s family originally founded, McCarty found himself belly-down in the dirt next to the barrier wall, just past the volatile Qalandia checkpoint. Armed with a bag of cheap green army men from an Arab-owned shop in East Jerusalem and a bright plastic boy from a Jewish-owned toy store in West Jerusalem, McCarty began to carefully reconstruct a very graphic drawing by one of his young collaborators: soldiers near this very place, shooting another little boy in the head. Completely absorbed in the work, McCarty barely registered the noise of protesters gathering at the checkpoint. Even as tear gas and stun grenades were shot into the crowd, his eye remained fixed on his camera’s viewfinder. In that moment, the only thing that mattered was bringing that boy’s story to life.
Brian McCarty grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. Like lots of kids, he remembers spending hours sprawled out on his bedroom floor, moving troops of plastic army men across a landscape constructed from bunched up dirty laundry and Legos. He remembers obsessing over the Men at Work music video “It’s a Mistake,” with its stop-motion sequences and die-cast Eagle Force figures. He owned them. He owned lots of toys—Transformers, Power Rangers, and G.I. Joe. Around the age of twelve, he discovered photography, and found that taking pictures of toys was a pretty good excuse to keep buying toys. By fifteen, McCarty had converted part of his mother’s carport into a studio. In 1996, he graduated from Parsons School of Design, and earned a grant from Benneton which immediately took him to Italy. He was invited to participate in KON©EPT, the first major photographic exhibition staged in Zagreb after the Croatian War of Independence. It would prove foundational.
…if they are seeing toys their own children might play with—they can’t dismiss the situation as something that happens to those people over there…”