Boxtree (2012), 124 pages
Chapters Bookstore, €1.00
Country: England 
I only bought this book when I saw a stack of them in Chapters selling for a euro apiece. I’d never heard of Slinkachu before but I’m glad I saw his stack of books. Slinkachu’s method is, on the face of it, simple. There is one photo showing what appears to be a standard scene but the facing photo is a zoomed-in view of part of the first scene. The viewer is then confronted with a minature human scene.
It could be argued that Slinkachu’s social commentaries and his method is too simplistic. However I think the brilliance of Slinkachu’s work is the simplistic originality of the images he creates. The juxtaposition of the full size image and the macro image highlights how desensitised we have become to the smaller details in a world populated by empty flashing images. In Global Model Village all of the photos are taken in the urban environment. Slinkachu plays with the notion of alienation, sometimes chosen, sometimes enforced, in the modern urban world. The scenes are cleverly altered depending on whether the scene is in the Western, Islamic, or Asian worlds. Similar to Banksy, Slinkachu highlights that the illusory freedoms offered by modern technology can potentially enable greater state surveillance and control.
Once you zoom into the scenes the univeralsity of the human experience and human fragility becomes apparent. Slinkachu makes the reader realise that viewed from space we’re no larger than the tiny figures he has so delicately created.
8/10
thedublinreader 