Story highlights Simon Brann Thorpe's project makes real-life soldiers resemble toy soldiers

He shot the images in Western Sahara, a disputed region of northwestern Africa

(CNN) Every day, images of war and conflict are splashed across our desktops, plastered on our TV screens and scattered through our mobile news feeds. Because of that, one's response to such imagery often becomes calloused or desensitized.

This concept of "how we digest images of war through mainstream media outlets," was what drove photographer Simon Brann Thorpe to begin his project "Toy Soldiers." This idea to create a fresh perspective drove him into the desert of Western Sahara, a long-disputed region of northwestern Africa.

Thorpe uses the area's harsh landscape as a powerful backdrop for soldiers posed as green plastic figurines -- similar to the popular toys that many children play with.

The soldiers are with the Polisario Front, an independence movement that has been clashing with Morocco over the region since the mid-1970s.

Photographer Simon Brann Thorpe

Thorpe said his project enables "the creation of a visual metaphor from which a viewer develops their own emotional, physical and political response to war and conflict, when faced with the realization that the images do not contain toy soldiers but real soldiers."

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