Photo project "The Real Toy Story" by photographer Michael Wolf about the hard days of Chinese workers

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

On holiday days, on the shelves in toy stores, you can find anything your heart desires: dolls for little princesses and cars for future motorists, fantastic animals and funny cartoon characters. True, these children's entertainments are not at all childish, which often frightens parents who want to pamper their children. Few people know that the retail price of one expensive toy is often higher than the half-year salary of workers in Chinese factories. Their difficult life is dedicated to a new project of the famous German photographer Michael Wolf entitled "The Real Toy Story".

China is the largest exporter of goods to the world market; about 75% of all toys sold on the planet are produced in this country. The photographer in this project tried to draw public attention to the problem of low-paid labor in the Celestial Empire. The author randomly posted pictures of Chinese factory workers among over 20,000 plastic toys. For the first time Michael Wolf presented this installation in 2004 in Hong Kong, it took the photographer and his three assistants three days to create it.

The idea of the project “matured” for Michael Wolf for a long time: for more than ten years he worked in Hong Kong. On one of his business trips to California, he went to a flea market that sold many Chinese toys. Since then, Michael began to collect his "collection", to each toy he attached a magnet and hung them on the walls of the exhibition hall.

Simultaneously with the preparation of the installation, Michael published a series of photographs of workers at toy factories in China. The photographer managed to capture the process of working on toys: he showed how tired the workers (in some pictures people just sleep at the workplace) and how much painstaking effort it takes to release the next batch of goods.

Each new project by Michael Wolf is original and topical. The photographer strives to show the daily small tragedies of big cities. Either he draws attention to the Chicago skyscrapers, living in which Americans experience loneliness, despite hundreds of neighbors behind the wall, or photographs the Tokyo pandemonium at rush hour in the subway, where the Japanese are forced to endure constant inconveniences, unable to relax. Naturally, the Hong Kong photo project is also devoted to a social problem that few people think about in modern society - the hard and low-paid labor of Chinese workers in factories.