Eric Renner took some beautiful pinhole photos of carnival chalk prizes.
Concurrent with the earliest days of American radio, film, and comic strips, three dimensional carnival chalk figures were won as prizes at carnivals throughout the United States (1915-1940s). These gaudy, tantalizingly tasteless doll-sized fantasy figures were used to symbolize, idolize, and replicate the first Hollywood stars, radio personalities, and cartoon characters from the Sunday comics. People of all ages would stream to local carnivals, a longed-for form of entertainment, to play games of chance hoping to win a carnival chalk prize of their choice to take home. Harmless as this seemed, the evocative qualities in these stereotypical figures only reinforced the American population’s deepest roots toward gender roles for women, men, race bias, and fantasy.
