Out of the Toy Box

thetwentytenproject of Steven Planck

by Molly Belmont, September 25, 2008

A few springs ago, photographer Steven Planck was cleaning out his mother’s attic. He was sorting through 25 years of detritus that had accumulated in the neglected space when he came across the relics of his childhood: three cardboard boxes full of well-used stuffed animals, Matchbox cars, and GI Joe figures. He found Voltron action figures and a Lazer Tag game he had shared with his sister. He found an old dictionary given to him by his absent father and a treasured stuffed bear he called L’il Truff.

These unexpected discoveries brought back years of childhood memories and put him right back in elementary school with all its innocent pastimes. As he looked through the boxes, he became a kid again, looking forward while still simultaneously looking back as an adult. “It’s nice to reflect on where you’ve come from, and where you are today, and whether or not you’re closer or further from where you thought you’d be,” Planck says. But the boxes also forced him to confront, in real space and time, just what he gave up from his childhood. He was struck by how much most adults sacrifice to conformity, and how much wisdom they lose in the search for understanding.

The experience was a profound one for Planck and inspired a sprawling photography project that is at once a meditation on youth and aging and an attempt to recover early innocence. Through this project, Planck wants to reconnect people with their childhoods, when there was room for a little fun. “We’re all consumed by the pressure of everyday things,” Planck says. “I just don’t think we’re enjoying life anymore.”

Planck conceived the portrait project as a three-part series, with a distinctly different look for each component. He dubbed the series thetwentytenproject (www.thetwentytenproject.com) for the planned year of its completion and held his first open photo shoot last April, when he shot over 500 frames. Next month, on November 15 and 16, he will hold another open photo shoot at his Wappingers Falls studio—a sunny, white space in the Market Street industrial park that he shares with several other photographers. The studio is organized into four different shooting spaces, replete with lighting equipment, backdrops, and props, but the vibe remains relaxed and informal.

For the first piece of the project, Planck shoots his subjects with toys from their childhood, in a black-and-white, flat, naturalistic style. In these portraits, the toys take on a totemic significance. These portraits are a little lonely, capturing their subjects and the objects they hold dear in an isolated and vulnerable moment, not unlike childhood itself.

When Tommy Confrey heard about the upcoming shoot, he knew exactly the toy he would bring. “Have you heard of Labyrinth?” Confrey asks. Confrey recalls the hours he spent sitting at a tiny table in a tiny chair hunched over the game, trying to navigate a marble through the wooden maze.