Classic Photography in Lego
British photographer Mike Stimpson playfully reimagines iconic images from Alfred Eisenstadt, W. Eugene Smith, Robert Capa, Eddie Adams, and other 20th-century masters.
Mike Stimpson
Charles Ebbets’ famous 1932 image Lunch Atop a Skyscraper, which depicted 11 men sitting on a girder on the 69th floor of the GE building, was an iconic image of the Great Depression. And despite obvious challenges of scale, the photo was Mike Stimpson’s first Lego creation. He used large Lego plates to create the unfocused skyscrapers in the background, and clipped the Lego girder to a light stand.
Mike Stimpson
Charles C. Ebbets / Corbis
Robert Capa’s 1936 photograph Falling Soldier has been accused of being staged in real life. But there is no doubt Stimpson’s was: His background is made up of only a towel, a sweater, and a pillowcase. Stimpson suspended the Lego with a swizzle stick. And though the original falling soldier is captured with an open shirt, Stimpson’s soldier is wearing a bowtie. “Not sure if the bow-tie was standard military uniform during the Spanish Civil War,” Stimpson said. “But I had to work with what I’d got.”
Mike Stimpson
Robert Capa / Magnum
“Lego [doesn’t] make any sailor figures so I had to improvise with an airline pilot,” Stimpson says of restaging Alfred Eisenstadt’s 1945 photograph, V.J. Day Times Square. And maybe Legos just aren’t meant for sex: The couple couldn’t get close enough with all of their limbs, so Stimpson removed the nurse’s right arm. Stimpson assembled a large street scene, and stuck the lovers together with Blue Track glue.
Mike Stimpson
Alfred Eisenstaedt, Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images
Stimpson wasn’t immediately sure he could do justice to Jeff Widener’s 1989 photograph, The Unknown Rebel, in Lego. “I wasn’t originally intending to do this photo as I wasn’t confident enough that I could build the tanks,” he says of the dramatic Tiananmen Square showdown. “A few people have noticed that the end of the gun barrel is the Star Wars Imperial insignia, I was quite pleased with that given that I'm a big Star Wars geek.”
Mike Stimpson
Jeff Widener / AP Photo
The Daily Mail commissioned Stimpson to recreate the famous photograph of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer on their wedding day in 1981. It took four hours for him to stage, but was worth it. “I enjoyed doing this one in particular as I’m old enough to remember watching the wedding on TV as a child,” he said.
Mike Stimpson
AP Photo
John Lennon and Yoko Ono held a “Bed-in” for peace at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal in 1969, where they invited visitors to join them in singing “Give Peace A Chance.” Stimpson used a silk handkerchief to recreate the sheets in his photograph, and printed custom decals for the signs on the wall. “As soon as I matched a bearded Lego head with a blond wig I knew I had to do a John Lennon photo,” he says.
Mike Stimpson
Bentley Archive, Popperfoto / Getty Images
“Closeup portraits and scenes with crowds of people aren't easy to do,” Stimpson says. But Steve McCurry’s 1985 National Geographic cover of Sharbat Gula, entitled Afghan Girl, was enough inspiration to give it a shot. The subject’s famous glowing green eyes, however, just couldn’t translate into Lego. “I did like the irony of recreating a photo whose major feature was missing, yet the photo was still recognizable,” he says. Next, Stimpson says he’d like to try other challenging portraits, like Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother and the iconic face of Che Guevara.
Mike Stimpson
Steve McCurry / Magnum
Joe Rosenthal’s 1945 photograph Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima is one of the most iconic American images of all time. But Stimpson admits that in terms of historical accuracy, “my version is a disaster.” There are four soldiers in his recreation, instead of five, and the American flag has more stars than it had in the original photograph.
Mike Stimpson
Joe Rosenthal / AP Photo
A plain gray Lego board was the perfect substitute for the surface of the moon in Stimpson’s recreation of Apollo 11’s 1969 moon landing. Though the setup was simple, he says he is most proud of the lighting that captured the rarified glow on the moon. If only Stimpson could train his Lego version of Neil Armstrong to utter: “One small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.”
Mike Stimpson
NASA / AP Photo
Eddie Adams’ General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. The grimace on the face of the Viet Cong makes this photo an arresting image, yet Stimpson made the decision to depict him with a smiling Lego. “The Vietnam execution was the first photo where I had to make a decision whether to treat the photo more seriously, but I stuck with my original decision as it appealed to my dark sense of humor,” he says.
Mike Stimpson
Eddie Adams / AP Photo
Hand of God depicts one of the most famous soccer moments of all time: when Diego Maradona scored a goal with an illegal—and unpenalized—hand ball during the 1986 World Cup between Argentina and England, which gave Argentina a 2-1 victory over the Brits. Stimpson’s version required lots of “invisible” thread to suspend the players. One string coincidentally created a “swoosh” effect across the photo, which reinforces the movement of the shot. “Every Englishman alive during the 1986 World Cup remembers this photo, even non-football fans like myself,” Stimpson says.
Mike Stimpson
Bob Thomas / Getty Images
Ian Bradshaw’s 1974 photograph of a streaker during the England-France rugby match became a famous image entitled the Twickenham Streaker. Stimpson decided that the subject’s long beard and unruly hair shouldn’t be replaced by the sleek yellow smile of a Lego. He says that the standard smiling face with a simple wig “made the streaker look like a woman,” so he invested in a custom-made bearded Lego to maintain the facial hair of the original.
Mike Stimpson
David Cannon, Allsport / Getty Images
W. Eugene Smith captured his children disappearing into a forest clearing in his 1945 photograph, The Walk to Paradise Garden. The iconic photograph now hangs on Mike Stimpson’s wall, but it took some courage to recreate. “I must have destroyed most of the trees in my garden getting the foliage for this shot,” he says.
Mike Stimpson
W. Eugene Smith, Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images
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