Sixteen years ago, Mark Hogancamp was attacked outside a bar in Kingston, NY. After coming out of a coma, Hogancamp created his own recovery therapy in his backyard — a miniature Belgian WWII town called Marwencol where Hogancamp can work on his dexterity and on his imagination. His book, Welcome to Marwencol, details Hogancamp’s story of his attack, his recovery, and his therapy-as-art project. It also showcases the photographs of Marwencol that he has taken. These photos have been exhibited in galleries in Kingston and New York City and were featured in Jeff Malmberg’s documentary Marwencol. For National Photo Month, we thought we’d run this book excerpt where co-author Chris Shellen describes Hogancamp’s process of creating and documenting Marwencol.
Constructing Marwencol
Mark built Marwencol entirely by hand — a painstakingly long process that began in 2002 with the construction of Hogancamp’s Ruined Stocking Catfight Club. The design for the bar and subsequent buildings came from Mark’s imagination and spotty memories of his days building trade-show sets. He sketched basic plans and foraged for building materials on roadsides and in trash heaps.
Each building is an artfully assembled patchwork of found wood, windows, roof shingles, nails, and screws. And each is inspired by something specific:
a person (Wendy Lee’s Kitchen, Pocket Full of Posies), a place (the Anchorage), a dream (Hogancamp’s bar), a loss (the Federal Cancer Center), a memory (the Marlo Inn), or an event (the great flood in the Kingston area in 2005 that resulted in the Church of Marwencol).
To make shooting photos of scenes inside the structures easier, Mark equipped them with clever forms of access — a window in place of a roof, a removable false front, or, in the case of the Town Hall, enough empty space for Mark to sit inside the building to shoot on rainy days.
Mark outfitted each of his structures with small props and furniture that were either found, donated by friends, or made by hand. Broken windshield glass along the roadside became ice in the drinks at Hogancamp’s. Hogie’s coffee cup held real coffee. Old photos and small images in magazines were used as wall art. Sofas were constructed by attaching cotton and fabric remnants to bricks.
He arranged the buildings in two parallel rows, forming a main street down the center of town, and ran his vehicles back and forth to create realistic tire tracks in the mud. Then he completed the illusion with small plants, flowers, and moss around the perimeter of his town — anything that looked authentic in miniature.
Photographing Marwencol
Having taken only a few photos in his life, Mark’s early photographic process moved at a glacial pace. The light meter on his camera was broken, so he would set up his figures, shoot a series of photos, mail the spent rolls to a film lab for processing, and wait a few weeks for the prints. If the photos were poorly exposed or the angle wasn’t right, he would reshoot the story from the beginning.
A few years after creating Marwencol, Mark’s beat-up old Pentax finally died. To help him continue his therapy, Mark’s mother bought him a digital camera — a Canon G6.
“She bought me a brand new Canon 7.1 megapixel digital camera, and I went from using a 35 mm, which was simple and manual, to this thing, which I hated, because I didn’t understand it.”
On New Year’s Eve 2005, desperate to film his bar’s festivities, Mark finally shut out all distractions and sat down with the camera’s manual.
“I didn’t want to know about all the fancy doodads. I just wanted to record my New Year’s Eve party. So I did, and the shots came out perfect.”
Mark’s new digital camera turned out to be much better than just a replacement. The camera’s flip-out viewer freed him from having to look through the viewfinder and enabled him to fit the camera into the tiny spaces occupied by his characters. And he was no longer restricted to twenty-four images every few weeks. With instant feedback and unlimited room to experiment, Mark was suddenly free to shoot as much as he wanted, whenever he wanted. He could experiment with different lighting schemes and new angles and setups.
He lay down on his stomach in the dirt, mud, and snow, bugs crawling all over him, in order to put his lens at eye level with his figures. He shot large tableaus, close-ups, over-the-shoulder shots, and reverse shots — just like in the movies — so his stories would feel more cinematic. At last, his photos reflected the rich adventures he saw in his mind.
Welcome to Marwencol by Mark Hogancamp and Chris Shellen is available from:
Mark Hogancamp created the 1:6 scale world of Marwencol as a means of recovery from a near-fatal attack that left him with traumatic brain injury. He is currently continuing his therapy at his home outside of Kingston, New York.
Chris Shellen is a writer and filmmaker based in California. A former film development executive, she produced the award-winning 2010 documentary Marwencol. She and her husband, Jeff Malmberg, are currently working on a new documentary set in Italy. The pair also enjoys an exciting parallel life in the world of Marwencol.
