io9
During the Vietnam War, world-famous photographers like Marc Riboud and Eddie Adams captured iconic (and traumatic) moments on film. In 2008, most war photographs are created by embedded journalists whose images are tightly controlled. So British photographer Mike Stimpson decided to make his contribution to the repository of war photography by staging mock Vietnam-era moments using Lego. This one, based on a 1967 protest in Washington, DC, stars Stormtrooper Legos as the US Army. See, it looks just like the original image.
This is a recreation of a famous 1968 photo by Eddie Adams of a soldier with his gun to a Vietnamese man's head. The Lego version is much less intense, but the irony of the gun and the smiley faces is creepy. Images by Mike Stimpson
Comments
Smiley faces are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo creepy.
"The Lego version is much less intense"
Yeah, just a bit. The real version is of the guy getting executed.
My favourite of the set is probably the Tiananmen Square recreation, which you didn't include here...
@TheAlmanac: More to the point, the Flickr collection isn't a collection of famous Vietnam war photos done in legos; it's a collection of famous photos in Legos. Three of the six aren't war photographs at all, and only two of the others involve Vietnam.
Lisa Katayama claims that the photographer is making some sort of anti-Iraq War/anti-embedded journalism (and, no doubt, anti-Bushitler, dictator of AmeriKKKa) statement, but unless I'm missing something there's no evidence of that at all. Now, if the next 50 photos are all along the lines of the napalmed Vietnamese girl and the Abu Ghraib criminals, that'd be one thing, but I suspect we're more likely to see the Hindenburg explosion or Apollo 11 on the moon or Robert Moses on the I-beam.
The only statement I do see is the upteenth post on io9 that adds a political spin to the content, whether justified by the subject or not. (And let's not forget the hundreds of posts slavishing over every aspect of Jericho, the two-time failure which never saw a "eevil corporate interests are the real traitors to America" cliché it didn't like.)
@ylee:
People who tweak out on buggy brainware are sometimes said to have "gone io9."
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