I have known Elizabeth since I was twelve.

When I first saw her I was playing in the backyard of my grandmother's house. Amongst the wild grass, shrubbery, and birch was a magnificent edge where the grass met a narrow steep rockery. Here, on a bed of dense moist soil, a spattering of stones, wild flowers and weeds, was my make-shift Normandy and with it, endless possibilities for play and ambush for my Action Man as he dove and hid from the enemy. It was here where I crouched, invisible to the world.

Or so I thought.

Over the fence, from a second story window, Elizabeth watched me play. She stood, pressed against the glass, wearing a black, tight-fitting low cut dress. As our eyes locked, my whole being froze, and I went blank, unable to acknowledge her with either a smile, a wave, or a simple nod of the head. What I did manage to do was to look away, and, overcome with shame, I managed to shift my gaze, first to the kitchen window of my grandmother's house, then to the barrel of fermenting sheep manure. Finally, looking down, I nestled my forefinger into the flexible rubber grip of my Action Man's hand and distractedly played with his arm, all the while trying to act as if she wasn't there. But I felt foolish, and a fool to ignore her. When I looked up to her again she was mouth open, but unsmiling. With her fingertips touching the glass, she withdrew somewhat and looked off to the side as if someone had called her name. Again, I took my eyes away from her and back down to my Action Man. But the battlefield had begun to fade. I was incapable of realising tactics and strategy. I could no longer grit my teeth or make the obligatory Tommy gun sounds with my mouth. I endured this new humiliation for an eternity, it seemed, before grabbing my Action Man and running into the house.

And the evening ended. I stood by the slightly opened door of my grandfather's study and watched my father hunched over some papers, listening to a Schubert Trio. Childhood had vanished. There was no warning, but I had played for the very last time.

When I was a kid I had dozens of Barbies. Maybe more. Beautiful girls, long-legged, pretty. Happy, passive faces, no matter what they were forced to endure. So, by the time I was eight or nine, many had shorn heads and scribbled-on eyes, missing limbs and rags for clothes. But every doll had a name, a role in my many ongoing bedroom serials about dating, weddings, kidnapping and hostage-takings. There were cheerleaders and models and housewives as well as strippers and prisoners of war. There was something very satisfying and addictive about playing Barbies, and I kept playing well after it was an age-appropriate thing to do.

Steven Naylor also admits to playing with dolls late into his own development, but he managed to make it into art.

Instead of Barbies as a child he had Action Man, the British version of the 1960-70's GI Joe. At ten, he was taking polaroids of fictional battle scenes in his grandparent's backyard. Revisiting the idea in his forties, long after his old soldiers were gone, Naylor diligently replaced the Action Men of his childhood. He got one figure for every variation of hair colour and skin tone. And the polaroids became digital.

His photographs today are vastly different from the dioramas of hobbyists, toy soldier fans, or even those of the 'serious' 1:6 scale action figure collectors. Like a kid forced to make-do with the family room floor for his backdrop, Naylor makes no attempt at scaled-down realistic environments. His CD collection (arranged alphabetically) is displayed unabashedly in the background, as are his wooden floor, his speakers, the side of the jam cupboard in his kitchen. There are few if any props; a vintage Action Man cot, a primitive doll's table and chairs purchased at an antique show. Tiny cigarettes handmade by a friend. Then, after hours of painstaking positioning and staging of every scene, he shoots each one from dozens of angles in order to absolutely communicate the story. More like comic books than a series of photographs, he doesn't want to leave anything to the viewer's interpretation. He is determined to control what we see and understand.

But despite his fastidious devotion to the plot, ultimately it's the expression of the men that brings life to each image. Naylor's greatest talent in this regard is his ability to detect and convey the individuality in every slight variation of the soldiers' painted faces and gestures. Through his lens they become plausibly analytic, burdened, tender, gentle, disturbed, humiliated and craving for things we can only imagine. Then there are subtler specificities; like how he morally divides them according to whether their hair is painted or fuzzy. And as soldiers, their solidly masculine exteriors are perfectly counterbalanced by the activities imposed on them. The intimate scenes are awkward and voyeuristic - naïve men discovering themselves and each other, possibly defining themselves with the roles of their professional relationships. Standing on tables, erotic posturing, a group sense of deviance and sexuality – (hopefully) more a fantastical reinterpretation of preadolescent ideas than like real-life men in the army. Each 'moment in time' he examines is eerily infinite, frozen in space, the actions of his subjects potentially permanent as he dares them to react.

After all my years of Barbie I'm jealous of the pose-ability and versatility of the old Action Men. But so much more, I envy Naylor's ability to humanize his figures in such a sympathetic way and with so much more imagination and nuance than I ever could have dreamed in my 'directorial' days. Every set-up is original and revealing and surprises the viewer with shared secrets and nostalgia and irony and emotion and humour. And despite his being untrained as a photographer, the tremendous detail and quality of each picture lends an aura and an authenticity that makes it all the more complete.

Jennifer Harrison is a Toronto artist best known for her thickly textured paintings of houses. She has been painting professionally for over ten years and has exhibited extensively throughout North America.

Combining elements of puppetry, animation, sculpture-installation and fiction, Naylor's dioramic photographs illustrate a not-so-subtle narrative about the battle between subconscious desire and appropriate boundaries of human behaviour. In the darkest corners of unused rooms, the action figures of his childhood are reborn into an adult world. Each figure is allowed to form and evolve its own identity. Some are good, some are bad, some don't know. Some prefer to watch.

Vaguely disturbing and comically obsessive, Naylor breathes life into his tiny statues then allows us access to his private show; a grown man's explorations of play, reminiscence and experimentation limited only by the perverted zen of his imagination.