Thomas Dagg was obsessed with Star Wars a kid growing up in Ottawa during the 1990s. He watched the trilogy on VHS so many times he wore out the tapes. When his parent’s promised him a Star Wars toy as a reward, he let the dentist pull two teeth without any complaints. And he'd save his weekly allowance to buy toys to add to his expansive Star Wars collection.
Dagg is now 24 and a successful photographer in Toronto who still loves the films. He credits Star Wars with inspiring him to become an artist, and he's spent two years working on a personal project called, appropriately, Star Wars. He uses Photoshop to seamlessly blend characters and spaceships from the films into every day scenes. The images invite viewers into the world of his childhood, when he imagined seeing a galaxy far, far away in everything around him.
“If it was a blizzard outside I always though of Hoth,” he says. “If I saw a jogger I would imagine them with Yoda on their back like Luke Skywalker. That was my childhood.”
Many of the photos are subtle. One photo appears to show nothing more than a train. Look closely, though, and you'll see Darth Vader among the passengers, as if the Sith lord is commuting to work. Dagg says he made that photo because as a kid he figured Darth Vader just rode public transportation after his TIE fighter lost control in the Battle of Yavin in Episode IV: A New Hope.
Another image shows an Ewok in a zoo, because as a child Dagg felt the creatures were too small to be considered among other movie characters. “I never understood how teddy bears could take out soldiers,” he says.
Other photos are more obvious. A tauntaun carries a rider down a snow-swept street. A giant All-Terrain Armored Transport makes its way toward a park. A ballplayer swings a lightsaber instead of a bat (look closely and you'll notice the illuminated sign in the stand features letters from a language perhaps only C3PO can speak). One particularly ominous photo shows a Star Destroyer filling the sky overhead.
Dagg intentionally made the photos less than perfect. He wanted them to appear like snapshots capturing moments in time, because that’s how he saw them in his youth. Nailing that technique was a challenge, though. All of the characters and spaceships seen in the photos are toys he's had since childhood, and convincingly blending them into the photos convincingly required careful attention to things like perspective, light and depth of field.
For example, the Walker looms menacingly over the park, which required shooting the toy from a perspective that made it feel large. If he was trying to blend a toy into an outdoor scene, he'd sometimes shot the toy at the same location to ensure the light was similar. And he always made sure images of the toys had the same depth of field as snapshots he used for the background.
“It was very technical but I really enjoy that stuff,” he says.
Dagg says some reactions to the work have been negative, with some people noting "inaccuracies." Such people are quick to note, for example, that a Star Destroyer couldn’t fly overhead because it was designed for interstellar space. For the most part, he says, the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive.
“Since it was such a personal project I didn’t expect it to blow up, but it’s been crazy how many other people have identified with it,” he says.
