Russian photographer Vse Ok, as he's known on his Tumblr, is the master of creating hilarious, and sometimes raunchy, vignettes with his action figures. A tiny Bruce Lee makes breakfast. Miniature Superman protects park-goers from bird droppings. Vse Ok uses six to eight sequential photos to tell his stories, with the last one culminating in some sort of punchline.
It all started in 2010 when he started giving the roaming-gnome treatment to a toy frog he won at an amusement park, photographing it in front of various attractions. By 2012, he had upgraded to toys with full range-of-motion. On a whim, he started shooting them striking poses that interacted with his friends looming in the same frame.
His friends liked the pictures. “They said it was cool, and I should continue doing such things because it was unusual and many people would be interested it.” The hobby started taking off, to the point where some of the shoots he does now require assistants, with his friends acting as the “heroes” of his series.
Vse Ok, like many kids, spent a lot of time drawing scenes of figures at battle or acting out little narratives when he was a lad. “I was constantly drawing little figures in various poses,” he says, adding that as time went on, he started getting interested in and collecting toys on eBay and at various shops around Moscow.
The more articulate the toys were, the better, although the toys were interesting to him for their own sake, and he says he never intended to make a photo series out of them. “When I was a kid I enjoyed playing with the flexible and movable toys, as they made my games more realistic,” he says. “I simply liked the toy and didn’t plan to take any photos of it.”
For his Tumblr (NSFW), the figurines inform the stories in each shot. In Vse Ok’s world, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator parties pretty hard and Tony Montana has lost his ability to differentiate between powdery white substances. In other words, he hems pretty close to reality. “I get my ideas from the characters, according to their personality or appearance,” he says.
At the moment, these photos represent little more than an entertaining hobby, but they play wonderfully on our common impressions of these classic characters. Vse Ok says that although he’s not pursuing photography professionally, he’s very interested in making better photos, and reaching people with them.
“I like the things I do, and I’m always trying to learn something new in the art of photography,” he says. “I never miss a chance to read professional literature or attend the lectures arranged by those who are really good in this area. I’m happy to amaze people with something new and funny, of course!”
All photos by Vse Ok
