Dolls

As soon as I walked into my friend's studio, my attention was immediately drawn to a battered doll that had been crudely nailed to the wall through the back of its ripped-open torso. It wasn't just the graphic horror of it; there was something haunting, disturbing and strangely sympathetic about its battered face. I wanted to capture whatever it was in a photograph. The Dolls project was completed using film and darkroom work. I took several images and started the darkroom work. After a long series of failures, I finally developed a totally new process using materials no longer available for making prints that elicited the same mix of feelings I had when I first saw the doll. It scared me. I found dozens of abandoned dolls thrown into boxes in the dark back corners of junk and secondhand stores. I photographed them where I found them. I still remember how eerie it was to hear a muffled cry from under the pile of old dolls as I rummaged through a box.