Why some photographers love photographing store front mannequins... Myself included.

 

As a professional writer I was prepared to write a blank page draft, then rewrite it sentence-by-sentence, put it aside for a few days, then revise it all. After another month or two of very meticulous word choosing and much grinding about punctuation, fluctuating tenses, and a lot of investigation into critical theory, I would rewrite each sentence several more times time but this time with a thesaurus at hand so I could find the most obscure or antiquated words to replace the less filigreed words and so make comprehension something only the true cognoscenti of readers of the blog would understand. Or even care to struggle through themselves.  Methinks. Apropos of nothing. Tally ho! And in this way I would struggle through months of writing in order to explain a very important concept: That there is something fun and attractive about photographing mannequins, in situ. 

But as I sat with my four dimensional, bifurcated, extruded, titanium keyboard, a cup of herbal tea and a lot of self-conscious ego bolstering I came to the conclusion that a long and windy explanation wasn't really required. Hence, to wit, the withering punctum: 

I like to make photographs of mannequins because in a sense I think I'm working to document the interesting work of artists from another field. As an exercise for me it's revealing to have an immovable model to work with so that I can experiment with subtle or big changes in camera angles, lighting, composition and tone. To move five or six inches in one direction, to create space between two mannequins, or to choose just the right aperture and camera-to-subject distance in order to create a focused image of a closer mannequin and a slightly, but obviously, softer rendering of a mannequin just a few feet further back.

In a well done store display a window designer creates a tableau; a visual story, with the way the "models" are dressed and how they are accessorized. How they are arranged. How they are lit. And if they are not lit then how the light at different times of the day affects all of the other variables. Often, the window tableaus will look even more interesting after dark, when only minimal lighting is used.

Most of the mannequins I photograph are facsimiles of women. Some, like a grouping I photographed in Boston many years ago, are fully featured with detailed eyes, facial features and plastic molded hair styles, and even perfectly included, permanent make up. Many current mannequins are featureless. Some have sunglasses and some do not. But in a certain sense they are a symbol for the power of shopping, the thrill of discovering new fashions (also an art form in most cultures), and also represent a certain aspirational cultural form (thin but feminine, unmoving but still graceful). 

Another thought that just occurred to me is that as a voracious reader since middle school of all kinds of science fiction, and now living in the blossoming field/industry/promise era of robotics, I also see mannequins as symbols of a society rushing headlong toward the accelerating creation of human-like robots. I only hope that Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics come along with the robots themselves. 

And since many of us are creatures who value aesthetics is it any wonder that we'd like at least some of our robots to be classically beautiful?????

It's nice to work with "models" who don't make weird faces and complain about how much weight they've gained or why they "hate" photographs of themselves. And, at least for editorial uses, the mannequins aren't asking for talent fees....yet.