I recently received a phone call from Jules Ober. She and her partner, Pierre-Jacques (P J), have published a number of special picture books and she was ringing to tell me about their latest, a remake of the classic Hans Christian Andersen fairytale, The Steadfast Tin Soldier. Their books are quite unique in that they tell the stories like a ‘paper movie’, all photographed in miniature.
Jules Ober and P J met 35 years ago in Paris. He was a punk with a strange hobby who worked in the film industry. Jules was an Australian photographer and darkroom technician who had moved to Paris to learn French and pursue her passion and love of photography. ‘P J was obsessed with toys and miniatures,’ Jules tells me. ‘Every surface of his tiny Parisian apartment was covered in toys. Walls, ceilings and bathroom included. He would spend all his spare time either painting medieval heraldic symbols onto tiny 1/72 figurines or riding horses at the ancient farmhouse he rented east of Paris.’
It was a whirlwind romance with the question being popped after three weeks and married at six months, on horseback in the little village of Marigny-en-Orxois. They returned to Australia to have a family in the ‘rain forested hills of NSW’.
‘P J had continued his eccentric hobby all these years. Instagram was just beginning and I was enjoying sharing my photographs,’ Jules says. ‘He would try to take some pics of his miniatures. I quickly got involved and it wasn’t long before we had lots of followers.’
Their ‘Little Soldier Stories’ books were born.
‘Each day P J would construct a new scene on a table by the window in our spare room and I would wait for the right light to capture it. Our first story told entirely in miniature gradually came together.’
The first book, The Good Son: A story from the first world war told in miniature won numerous prestigious prizes and was reviewed in The New York Times as having ‘… the power of a timeless fable’.
Jules tells me that 18 months ago, P J secured funding from the French Centre National du Livre for his idea to remake a classic Hans Christian Andersen fairytale, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, which was first published in 1838. They headed off to Kyoto, Japan, where they discovered an extraordinary antique shop and the ancient city’s waterways.
Here they brought their little tin soldier, painstakingly setting scenes with the imagery around him and adding a dazzling cast of toy and human characters to create the book.
The Steadfast Tin Soldier tells the tragic story of a toy soldier’s love for a maiko doll. When the tin soldier finds himself on the shelf of an extraordinary antique toy store in Japan he is warned against gazing at a doll by a jealous yōkai, but he persists. Spurred on by supernatural forces, he is propelled headfirst into a chain reaction of terrifying events that even the most steadfast tin soldier surely couldn’t survive.
As we finished our conversation Jules sent a tingling up my spine. She tells me that in the Hans Christian Andersen classic story there is a fire, and the toy shop burns down.
Eerily, after shooting the images for their book and returning to Australia there was a fire in the store next to the Maiko Antiques in Kyoto where they shot many of the images for their book. The store was severely damaged. The owner is devastated and has been trying to salvage what he can. Part of the proceeds of the book are going towards a crowdfunding campaign to help them fix and reopen the store. If you’d like to know more about the crowdfunding campaign, go to gogetfunding.com/maiko-antiques.
What a joy these two creative people are. It’s a special thing to have two people who have such a love for each other but also have that connection in their work. They complement each other so perfectly. Patience and passion. How lucky are we to be able to share in a little piece of that.
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