Doing some digging around online (dare I call it research?)
Best summation of my idea on why Mr. Stimpsons work is art :
"Lego is seriously one of the building blocks of life. We’ve got Carbon, we’ve got Hydrogen, and then we’ve got Lego. It should have it’s own atomic symbol and everything. There isn’t a single person I know who doesn’t have childhood memories of sitting on the living room floor building something out of Lego blocks."
http://shapeandcolour.wordpress.com/2008/04/01/mike-stimpson-classics-in-lego/
I buy that statement. I've got loads of legos at home, some of them still put together in sets, some sets still in pieces that I'll probably never get around to repairing and putting back together.
Take a basic building block like Lego, and mix it with iconic, maybe even defining moments of human history, and you've got a wonderfull work of art. A photograph can be viewed as a record of an event, and each moment a photograph captures is itself a small part of a bigger picture. For instance, the picture of a navy sailor kissing a nurse on VJ day is a mere snapshot of what happened worldwide that day. There were other events that happen across the globe on that day. The picture is only a record on two people, for less then one second, on that particular day. It is an important photo, but what it captures is only a small part of the happenings of the world on that day. That snippet of time is just like a tiny lego block - it is but a mere part of what happened on that day. The same can be said for the image in a cultural context. It is one of the first images that comes to mind when people think of VJ day; It is the defining visual moment that people associate with that day, and that event. Think of the power that world war two had, and all that happened. And people remember the end of it all by one single photograph. One photograph represents the end of years of war, hundreds of thousands of deaths, and the re-shaping of the "modern" world.
There are also other connections that can be made between real people and lego people. Lego people don't move; It takes human intervention for them to walk, talk, dance, drive, etc. Or, at least, no ones seen them do these things on their own. . .yet. . . .The same can almost be said of photography. Beautifull images exist all around us, all the time. The way someone leans over in front of a computer, or the way light filters through the window blinds as a cloud passes by. These images are fleeting and beautifull, but they don't exist, and can't be shown and shared unless someone actually takes the picture. The potential is there, but sometimes it all comes down to recording it for others to see.
I found some supposedly "better" versions by another photographer
http://www.cefvigo.com/galego/galeria_vilari%F1o.htm
I don't like them at all. Stimpson leves his lego figures in "standard" lego configuration; He doesn't change their proportion at all, and leaves them as Lego designed and built them. This guy sort of creates new lego figures that I don't like.
Here's a comparison.
Stimpson (whom I like)
Mr. Virlano (who I don't like)
And, just for yucks, the original Robert Cappa Photograph
Now, neither rendition in Lego looks particularly human. Neither lego "figure" turly captures the pose and the anguish that the spanish soldier is in as he falls. But what in the world happened to the guy in Mr. Virlanos photograph? His leg is angled with sharp points in it. His head has this wierd ear thingy on it, and his arms are totally out of lego proportion. Mr. Virlano doesn't follow the established traditions for rendering lego people. His person doesn't look lego, but hes way too blocky and shapeless to be human either. Its okay to use Legos, and the traditions and connotations that go along with it, like Mr. Stimpson does. But when you distory it like Mr. Virlano does, the only thing I think of is "Boy, that guy cheaped out and got lazy making a human figure." There's nothing that connects his use of lego with his photographic reproduction. As far as I can tell, he used lego cause it was cheap and easy, not because he actually WANTED to SPECIFICALLY use LEGO.
(SEGWAY - This is now making me think about different ways to render/show the human form, from classic painting, to these lego people, to XKCD's stick-figures, and on. . .it would be cool to curate an exhibit solely on different ways to render people. I'll post a blog entry on this alone tomorrow.)
-Traces/Tracing - the term of conbining meanings from two different cultures/subtexts, and the creation of a new meaning that calls upon an unerstanding of both subtexts to create a new text.
