Benjamin Chesterton, Duckrabbit and Eleanor Macnair: Visual Storytelling

Two very different approaches to the photographic image share this address. Benjamin Chesterton makes documentary films and audio-led stories through duckrabbit, the production and training company he co-founded. Eleanor Macnair remakes famous photographs in Play-Doh, photographs the models and publishes the results. One extends the photograph with sound and motion; the other strips it down to coloured shapes. Both were part of a London photography talk in May 2017, and this page is about the work.

Benjamin Chesterton and duckrabbit

duckrabbit is a film production and training company formed in 2008. Its own account of itself describes two halves to the business: making films for commercial, charity and broadcast clients, and running audio-visual storytelling, production and communications training in the United Kingdom and internationally. Chesterton co-founded the company and is its production director, directing and producing the films and leading the training. Before that he produced documentaries at the BBC, which is where the company's emphasis on audio comes from.

The client list and the award record point at the same territory. The company lists work for Oxfam, the British Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières, WWF, Greenpeace, WaterAid, Wellcome, the Guardian and The Times, with projects filmed in countries including Malawi, Sierra Leone, Ukraine, Rwanda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Bangladesh and India. Its stated awards include two National Press Photographers Association awards, two Pictures of the Year International awards, a British Press Photographers' Association multimedia award and a Sony Production Award for factual film-making. In 2016 it won the POYi multimedia news reporting category and the main prize at the Crossover Web Documentary Festival.

That combination of charity clients and journalism prizes is the interesting part. Most non-governmental organisation film-making is advocacy, and advocacy is not usually judged against news reporting standards. Working in both at once means arguing continually about how the people in a film are represented. The training side of duckrabbit approaches that from the other direction, by teaching the organisations themselves how to gather and edit material.

Eleanor Macnair

Eleanor Macnair makes Photographs Rendered in Play-Doh. In her own description of the project it began on a whim in August 2013, after a photographic pub quiz run by the artists MacDonaldStrand in Brighton where one round asked teams to reproduce a famous photograph in Play-Doh. She describes her tools plainly: Play-Doh, a chopping board, a scalpel and an empty wine bottle as a rolling pin. The models are photographed and the photographs are published. By her own count the archive now runs to nearly 400 recreated images.

Speaking to Photoworks, she described both the origin of the idea and the research that keeps it going.

They say you only need one good idea in life. I didn't have one so I borrowed theirs.

In the same interview she explained that she spends about as much time looking for images to reproduce as making the models, often going through online museum collections to find lesser-known pictures by well-known photographers, or researching contemporary photographers she comes across. She is also an art publicist by profession, and she has drawn a parallel between that work and the series, since both involve making specialist material legible to a wider audience.

The project has produced two books. The first, Photographs Rendered in Play-Doh, was published by MacDonaldStrand with Photomonitor in autumn 2014 and is now out of print. The second, Whilst The World Sleeps, was published by RRB Photobooks in 2024 in a signed edition of 500. It draws on the archive to assemble what the publisher calls an alternative photographic history, told in just over fifty recreated images, many of them published for the first time. The work has also been exhibited, including a solo show at Mai Manó House, the Hungarian House of Photography in Budapest, from 23 April to 22 June 2025, and a presentation at the Photoville festival in New York the same year.

Two ways of handling a photograph

Set side by side, the two practices make a point about where meaning sits in a photograph. duckrabbit's work adds to the frame: recorded voices, ambient sound and sequence give a still image a duration it did not have, which suits stories where the subject's own account is the evidence. Macnair's work subtracts instead. Reducing a famous photograph to modelling clay removes tone, texture, detail and often the face, and what survives the translation is composition and gesture. Because she links to the original image when she publishes a rendering, the series also works as a reading list, which makes it appropriation that sends people back to the source rather than replacing it.

The use of recorded conversation alongside photographs comes up again on our page about George Georgiou and the A Small Voice podcast. For the other photographers covered here, see the speakers index and the archive of past talks.

This site is an independent journal. It is not affiliated with the former PhotoForum talks group, it is not connected with duckrabbit, and it does not organise events.