Toledano’s Dad and Commoditising Imperialism

Philip Toledano‘s Days With My Father has got some coverage recently, and rightly so. There is a perfect balance and appropriate tone throughout the series which is inescapable. Aline Smithson included it in Photographing Family – her well reasoned Too Much Chocolate piece about the imperative of family to photographers.

It is even more remarkable because it is such a departure from his cynical but pointed political work America The Gift Shop.

In a Decemebr, 2008 interview with Joerg, Toledano explained that for the really complex stuff he had to turn to China:

“Only the inflatable Guantanamo Bay prison cell and the Abu Ghraib bobblehead were made in China. The rest was made in America. To find Chinese manufacturers, I Googled ‘bouncy castle manufacturers, China’ or ‘bobblehead manufacturers, China’ and then emailed a few companies. It was really simple. And then, for the bobblehead, for instance, I sent the manufacturer the actual photo from Abu Ghraib, and they’d email me photos of progress, with me commenting along the way. The whole project, from start to finish, probably took me about six to eight months, all told. That’s the amazing thing about the web – ANYTHING is possible now.”