What if a photograph wasn’t printed, but built layer by layer from paper, or sculpted out of soft, colorful clay? What if it didn’t just capture reality, but reshaped how we remember it?
In an age of instant scrolling, artists Lauren Camara and Eleanor Macnair slow photography down, bringing it off screens and into the physical world. Showing at Photoville 2025 in Brooklyn, their work doesn’t just bend photography’s rules, it rewrites them.
Camara, a Bronx-based artist, transforms her own photographs into intricate cut-paper portraits, pulsing with texture, cultural symbolism, and personal memory. Across the Atlantic, Macnair recreates iconic images in Play-Doh, sculpting legendary photographs by Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, and Robert Frank into surreal, candy-colored miniatures. Each creation is then photographed, an image of an image, before being dismantled, returning the clay to the box.
These aren’t just clever remixes. They’re thoughtful, tactile ways of challenging what a photograph is, and who it’s for. By layering their personal art practices into photographic traditions, Camara and Macnair blur the lines between photography, craft, and sculpture. It’s about reshaping how moments are seen, remembered, and shared.
Reimagining Photography, one Play-Doh piece at a time
When UK-based artist Eleanor Macnair first sculpted a photograph out of Play-Doh, it wasn’t part of an artistic vision, it was a pub quiz challenge. “One of the rounds was to make a photograph out of Play-Doh,” she recalls. “And my team won. It was really cute.” That playful moment sparked Photographs Rendered in Play-Doh, a project that would grow into a global meditation on photography, memory, and accessibility.
Twelve years later, Macnair’s Play-Doh photos have been shown in galleries and festivals like Photoville. It began with frustration working at a museum, she saw how social media posts got stuck in red tape. “Every post had to be signed off by like 10 people,” she says. “And the stories weren’t very interesting; they used language that didn’t connect.”
Shortly after, she picked up some Play-Doh at the supermarket. “I thought, this is how you do it,” she says. Her first recreations quickly gained attention for their color, humor, and fresh take on iconic photos.
Despite the playful material, her process is precise. She works in the evenings, after her son is asleep, using chopping boards and an old wine bottle as a rolling pin. Image selection often starts with endless folders of jpegs. “Then I notice patterns, like, there are loads of birds or sofas,” she says. “Maybe it’s the intimacy of the space.”
Her goal isn’t a perfect copy. “It’s not about dumbing it down, it’s about condensing it. Getting to the essence,” she says. It’s a way of slowing down the viewer, bridging quick social media scrolls with the weight of the original image.
Each model is photographed, sometimes dozens of times, in natural light on her balcony or in the garden. “I’m not a photographer,” she admits, “but I’ve gotten used to it.” Then, the sculpture is dismantled. Colors get reused. “There’s a green that appears in Robert Frank and Charles Moore,” she says. “So even the Play-Doh carries echoes, just like influence does in photography.”
Macnair didn’t go to art school and never imagined herself as a visual artist. “I used to be the audience that felt uncomfortable in art spaces,” she says. “Like it wasn’t for me. I’m not qualified.”
Ironically, she ended up working in galleries, inside the system that once felt so exclusive. “You don’t have to speak in a certain language or have the right qualifications,” she says. “You can just love images.”
Play-Doh became part of that ethos: cheap, accessible, imperfect. “I wanted to keep some aspects amateur,” she says. “Because it’s important to me that anybody can be an artist.”
At its core, her work is about slowing down and seeing anew. “Some images, you’ve seen them so many times you don’t really see them anymore,” she says. “But if you see my version first, maybe you go back to the original with fresh eyes.”
That reframing can open doors. “People have told me they didn’t think they liked photography until they saw the Play-Doh versions,” she says. “Or they discovered a photographer they’d never heard of.”
She doesn’t claim to change the canon. But if it sparks curiosity? “That feels like a good thing.”
This year, Macnair’s work appears at Photoville in New York. She couldn’t attend in person, but loved being part of it. “It’s absolutely brilliant,” she says. “It’s free, outdoors, and open in a way so many art spaces aren’t.”
As someone who once felt like an outsider, accessibility still matters deeply. “Art should be for everyone,” she says. “And I think Photoville really gets that.”
Though she hasn’t made a new Play-Doh image in months, the project isn’t over. “Every time I think I’m done, I get asked to show the work in Budapest or somewhere else,” she says. “And then I think, well… maybe I’ll make some more.”
What keeps her going is simple: “It’s meditative. Just sitting down and making something brings me back to why I loved art in the first place.”
In doing so, Eleanor Macnair isn’t just remaking photographs, she’s quietly reshaping how we relate to art itself: making it less intimidating, more colorful, and far more human.
Pieces of paper, pieces of people
When Bronx-based artist Lauren Camara first encountered paper as a graphic designer, it wasn’t with the intent to create fine art. It was simply about obsession, obsession with texture, with color, with the potential hiding in the swatchbooks printers once handed out by the dozen.
“I genuinely just was obsessed with all of the papers,” she says. “I knew that it would be very rare to use any of those in design work… Most people, if they’re going to print a brochure, they’re not going to do it on electric blue text paper. So I really just had them to mostly admire.”
But admiration turned into impulse. “It just hit me that I wanted to create something from them,” she says. Her first work was small, almost tentative, because it had to be. “I had to work really, really small, just with the pieces of paper that I had.”
Today, that initial playfulness remains, but her process has evolved into something deeply precise and emotionally immersive. “The core is still the same,” she says. “I’m obsessed with paper. I’m obsessed with the color. I am so in love with what I’m doing, and I just want to create something.”
Making her art takes time, often slower than she’d like. “I don’t want to say painfully slow because I really enjoy the process,” she explains. “But sometimes it’s hard creatively because I want to get to the next place and I can’t get there.” Each piece requires her total presence. “I am in it from beginning to end. Like, I dream about it. I think about it all day long. I go to sleep thinking about it. I wake up thinking about it.”
This kind of immersive labor, sometimes 200 to 350 hours per piece, demands more than technical skill. It demands emotional connection. “I need to be emotionally connected to what I’m doing,” she says. “To the subject, to the piece. I go section by section and I go down a rabbit hole of details.”
Her subjects are often people she’s encountered around the Bronx; neighbors, strangers, skateboarders in the park, a protester who stands daily on a street corner. She captures what she calls “everyday moments,” and renders them as intricate, layered paper portraits that shimmer with color and complexity. “I just hope that my work makes people feel seen,” she says. “Just regular people like myself, in regular, everyday moments.”
Behind each of her intricate paper portraits is a photograph she’s taken, an image reimagined through her own lens, shaped by how she sees the world. Making this a two-step process she never thought about before, her own photography becomes part of the final piece, integrated into the work itself. Her subjects are often people from her daily life. “Like with my son, I just saw his profile and I was like, ‘Ah, that’s perfect,’” she laughs. “It wasn’t something I would have ever thought of…until I saw it.”
Her Photoville project, Pieces of You, is a culmination of this ethos: a tribute to the quiet significance of ordinary people. “It’s really about people, about you, about everyday people,” she says. “I just want people to be moved in some way. Maybe it’ll be joy. Maybe it’ll be relief. But my hope is that it brings somebody some happiness.”
Despite her growing recognition with groups like the Paper Artist Collective and BX 200, Lauren still wrestles with doubt after every piece, wondering if she can top her last work. That vulnerability makes her connection to pieces like Chess and Poetry on 235th all the more personal: a double portrait of two neighborhood men, including Matthew Little, a “character” she’d often seen. When he shared that he was the only chess player who’s also a poet, and recited a poem for her, Lauren felt deeply moved. “I loved that piece. He was just really cool.”
As she continues developing new pieces, she holds onto that feeling the resonance, the recognition, the shared humanity. “It’s not about extraordinary moments,” she says. “It’s just… this is what we have. These moments. And I want people to see how much that matters.”
In a sea of fleeting digital images, Eleanor Macnair and Lauren Camara remind us that lasting impressions are made by hand. Through Play-Doh sculptures and layered paper portraits, they bring photography back to the tangible and intimate. Their work invites us to slow down and truly see the stories images tell, reshaping not just photos, but how we see each other.
More information on Photoville here.
