Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london
this week’s theme (in case you hadn’t noticed) casts a look at inanimate replica versions of human beings. I used to photograph mannequins a lot. Not quite obsessional but consistently so. And they slipped off my radar for a few years but they seem to have reemerged in my sights recently. You can never really explain what you gravitate towards as subject matter but I believe you should always just go with it and accept when it passes. I was been drawn to that depressed, forlorn look. They seem saddened by the fact that their entire existence is to consist solely of being on display with no ability to escape their plight or the gaze of those that gawp at them.
Mannequins live in what they call the ‘uncanny valley’, a term normally ascribed to computer generated characters but it essentially means something that looks eerily like us but not quite. We project meaning onto them because they look like us so we sub-consciously assume they might have the same feelings as us even though we know they cannot. A bit like traffic wardens..
We will undoubtedly deal with humanoid robots the same once they become a feature in our lives which seems on the cards looking at recent technological developments. Our ongoing obsession with creating artificial versions of our bodies and brains definitely seems to be driving so much innovation at the moment. Why? Personally I think its a God complex. We arrogantly feel we can do better than nature. The irony is that if we succeed we will be only be successful in creating our replacements as everything indicates that robots will render the human workforce unemployable and AI will apparently seek to destroy us the moment its up and running. We seem to be doing everything we can to make ourselves ultimately obsolete. Not quite sure why exactly. Its clearly a defect. We should be sent back to the factory for a full diagnostic…
If you want to see my original gallery “Still Living” please click here