The Rural We: John Seven
The North Adams writer and photographer is exhibiting his "Tiny People" collection of doll trading cards at Images Cinema.
Thanks to the Barbie movie, dolls are a hot topic right now. But Barbie is not the kind of doll John Seven has been collecting for years, or includes in his Tiny People trading card series. Seven, a writer and photographer in North Adams, is the author of 12 children’s books, and for the past 20 years has worked as an arts journalist, columnist and media review for the Berkshire Eagle, Berkshire Magazine, and numerous other publications. “Tiny People: Photos and Stories by John Seven” is an exhibition of photos from his trading card series that feature a doll headshot on one side and the doll’s biography on the other. The exhibition is on display at Images Cinema in Williamstown for the month of August.
For a long time, I have on and off done photo projects involving action figures. When I first moved to the area, I got to know Jarvis Rockwell — his big thing was a pyramid covered with action figures from his collection, and that helped propel me in the doll direction. My wife is an artist and makes art dolls, but they’re very primitive and focused on death issues. I had been working as her photographer on her dolls for selling online. During the pandemic, with a lot of time on my hands, I committed to up my photography skills. I decided I wanted to do some more doll-specific things — in a pandemic, it’s easier to wrangle dolls.
It struck me that what I wanted to do was a portrait series of certain dolls. I treat dolls like I’m doing casting. I write roles and stories and find the perfect doll for the story, or sometimes I find the doll and write for it. I wanted to do them as trading cards like a microfiction project. I found AI animation software that could animate the dolls, and I came up with script ideas and monologues. They’re the same as the cards except a video, which I put on YouTube. I’ve done near 100 monologues, some inspired by my own rants, which I turned into a monologue, or from the hundreds of interviews I’ve done over the years. It’s an opportunity to get to know more about the private lives of popular dolls, what they do when they’re not being manipulated by children intent on imposing their own ideas on how the dolls should live.
I’ve found a lot of the dolls on eBay. I’m amazed at their personalities even though they’ve been mass manufactured — as opposed to Barbie, which never had a lot of personality. Some of the dolls are funky and stylish, packed with personality of a bygone era. Others are just weird. If they were people you would stare at them on the street. Some people don’t know what to make of my Tiny People cards and videos, but they’re something I felt compelled to do.
