The Miniature Action Figure Town of Marwencol

This is not the new promotional ad for Barbie.  This is the fictional city of Marwencol

by Mark Hogancamp done at 1/6 scale.

Marwerncol (a merging of the names of his two lady crushes and his own name) is mostly set in World War II, owing to Hogancamp's being an ex-Navy.

Admittedly, his laborious, surreal dioramas do not have any aesthetic or artistic aspirations, at least in the beginning.  In 2000 Hogancamp was badly beaten in a New York bar by five men, leaving him in a coma for nine days.  He lost some of his memories, his speech, and was unable to walk.  The Marwencol dioramas were his way to regain back a piece of his life.

So when funds were low and he couldn't afford hospital rehab anymore, he took to messing around with his beloved action figures, staging scenes and taking photos of them as a way to pass time and in the process rehabilitate himself as well.

 Each photograph is part of an ongoing narrative, much like a comic book or stills from a movie.  And eventually someone took notice.  (This kind of haunting menagerie is pretty much hard to ignore).  New York galleries exhibited Hogancamp's Nazi-invaded photos, and last year

filmmaker Jeff Malmberg made a documentary about Hogancamp simply called Marwencol.