Brian McCarty. War-Toys

28/01/2023 - 21/05/2023

Musée de la Photographie 
Place des Essarts 
11, avenue Paul Pastur 
6032 Charleroi

www.museephoto.be   

 
Brian McCarty, an American photographer living in California, devised the project of depicting global conflicts through the prism of the experience lived by children ever since a trip to Croatia in 1996, shortly after the war of independence.

Since 2011, the photographer has been materialising his collaboration with children who have been affected by war in Iraq, in Syria, in Israel, in Palestine, in the Lebanon and more recently in Ukraine through a series of photographs entitled War-Toys. The project invokes the principles and practices of expressive art therapy to gather and articulate children’s accounts of war.

From these accounts and these drawings, often using second-hand toys bought in local shops, Brian McCarty reconstructed these scenes at the actual places where these tragedies occurred, and then photographed them, materialising them in some way, while placing himself from the children’s perspective alone.
The children’s drawings accompany Brian McCarty’s photographs on the walls of the exhibition.