What if there was a world that could fit in your pocket?

What if there was a parallel universe to ours, in which tiny people (or other little creatures) lived out their everyday lives directly alongside our own? What if there was a world that could fit in your pocket? Or where your dolls could live out your dreams? In which mice lived like people? Or in which pint-sized little yous got up to all kinds of shenanigans?

These artists have also asked “What if…”

Imagining a Miniature Reality

“Broccoli and parsley might sometimes look like a forest, or the tree leaves floating on the surface of the water might sometimes look like little boats,” Japanese miniature artist Tatsuya Tanaka says. “I wanted to take this way of thinking and express it through photographs.” From that starting point of broccoli, Tanaka has been making a daily scene of life in miniature for the past ten years.

It’s that one thought, about the broccoli trees (c’mon, you’ve thought it, too!), that Tanaka credits for a seemingly unending ability to create and imagine. (Apparently, he did not even like broccoli, but Tanaka started eating it after it jump-started his career. And now his kids eat it, too.)

Tanaka uses stuff you’d find around the house, like fruit and veggies, utensils, office supplies, medicine cabinet essentials, and so much more to create his scenes. When he sees these things, he doesn’t see them for what they are. He sees them for what they could be… for mini people. And, thus, unrolled toilet paper becomes a ski slope, a computer mouse becomes a race car, piano keys become a crosswalk, a banana becomes a hammock, and a red paper clip becomes the red-hot heating element of an electric grill. Just add tiny figurines. And don’t stir. Or breathe. Because everything must stay in place!

Thinking Small

Widely known as the world’s first “miniature photographer,” Tanaka had a longtime serious hobby of collecting mini figures. (Umm, he has about 50,000 of them, actually. Good thing he turned this into a job, right?) He also loved making plastic dioramas. And he has a degree in art. But, really, his work is about having a completely unique and “unrestrained perspective” of the world.

Tanaka is able to see beyond an object, to what else it could be and what it resembles. “For example, people who cook can imagine the dishes [they’d make] from the food in the refrigerator,” he explains. “It‘s similar to that kind of perception.” So, he looks around at objects in everyday life and then he tries to create a scene that people will recognize — regardless of background, age, nationality, language, culture, and so on.

Each mini scene may look simple enough, but believe it or not, they take around five hours to create and photograph. He paints the figurines himself and then uses computers to help him figure out how to set up his scenes and where to put each piece. Then he arranges everything with tweezers (and glue).