In 1918, the painter Oskar Kokoschka, wrecked by the end of his affair with Alma Mahler, commissioned the dollmaker Hermine Moos to build a life-size effigy of her. Photographs of the finished doll survive, leaned back in an upholstered chair, and they mark the start of a strange, persistent tradition: serious artists turning their attention, and eventually their cameras, on the manufactured companion. The tradition runs unbroken to the present, and the pictures are better than you'd expect.
Photography circled the subject all through the twentieth century, from Hans Bellmer's surrealist constructions to the doll work of David Levinthal and Cindy Sherman, but the modern chapter has an unlikely entry from Helmut Newton, who photographed RealDolls and recorded in his autobiography that Playboy declined the shoot as too weird. Sit with that for a second. The photographer who defined glossy desire pointed his camera at a silicone woman, and the result was too unsettling for a men's magazine. Whatever this object is, it does something to a lens.
The definitive documentary treatment belongs to Elena Dorfman. Her series Still Lovers, shown at Paris Photo in 2004 and given a New York solo exhibition at Edwynn Houk Gallery the following winter, photographed dolls and their human companions at home: at the kitchen table, in front of the television, in bedrooms with ordinary light coming in. Dorfman worked to one rule that keeps the pictures honest. She staged nothing, asking owners instead to show her their actual routines, and the dolls, a hundred pounds and more, were lifted and posed entirely by the people who lived with them, people who described themselves variously as husbands, fiancés, and friends. Dorfman has said the project began as curiosity and turned into a serious study of emotional ties. The book, published in 2005, is now treated as a contemporary photography classic, and its influence carried: the series helped inspire Lars and the Real Girl two years later.
Laurie Simmons came at the subject from the opposite direction. A Pictures Generation artist who had spent decades photographing dolls and dummies at miniature scale, she ordered a customized love doll from Japan in 2009 and let it take over her work and, for a while, her house. The Love Doll series is titled like a diary, starting with Day 1 (New in Box), and follows the doll from the crate and the plain cotton slip she arrived in through bubble baths, borrowed jewelry, the garden, the pool. Simmons turned her Connecticut home into a life-size dollhouse for the project and has said she found it fascinating and disturbing in equal measure that a body like this could simply be purchased and delivered. The series was exhibited in New York, Paris, and Tokyo, collected in a 2012 book printed on paper chosen to suggest the feel of the doll's skin, and eventually hung in a museum survey. Whatever else that proves, it settles one argument: the object photographs like a subject.
Put the four bodies of work side by side and the pattern has nothing to do with provocation. Kokoschka's doll was grief. Newton's was desire pushed until it unsettled its own audience. Dorfman's were domestic life, recorded straight. Simmons' was a day-by-day relationship with an object that kept threatening to become a character. Different decades, different intentions, one shared finding: the full-size doll rewards sustained attention the way few manufactured things do, which is precisely why owners keep giving it that attention. And these weren't special museum props. Dorfman shot the dolls people actually lived with; Simmons ordered hers the way any customer would, the way you'd order from a retailer like sexdollfullsize.comom today, at the true-to-life scale that makes the photographs land. The camera never settles whether the doll is somebody. It settles that she's worth looking at, and the art world signed off on that verdict a long time ago.