This project is called “You Always Hurt The Ones You Love” – a series of portraits of dolls taken on an analogue 4×5 view camera and a high-quality digital camera. The dolls will be old or used and collected from various sources such as thrift stores. The portrait session for the dolls will be similar to photographing a human with attention paid to lighting and backgrounds. Once loved treasured and precious yet over the years often modified, such as cutting to their hair, drawing on them, reversing arms and other experiments. This leads us to the question what do dolls represent? Is it the pressure in society to be beautiful to fit in, do we control our own image? Presented as an exhibition this project aims to provoke the viewer to question their relationships to the past, to their own bodies the interplay of innocence and sexuality that is often represented in dolls made since the sixties. Are they a metaphor for a culture that’s still infinitely more preoccupied with a female’s appearance than her thinking?
