Snap Judgment

Debris-strewn battlefields, soldiers, and suicides are generally not the stuff of child's play. Apparently photographer Paolo Ventura never got that memo, though, as he uses action figures and handmade dolls to re-create scenes from World War II Italy in War Souvenir (Contrasto, $30), in which he also concocts detailed backstories (''Lovers in the Bar Nazionale. Giovanni Degrada, the waiter, dies in the spring of 1944...''). ''My grandparents were always whispering stories in my ear about the war,'' says Ventura, 37. ''I had these memories and I wanted to reshape them into a new reality.... With small-scale, there's an ambiguity where you don't know exactly what you are seeing.''