Nowadays, little girls want to look like their idols: Lorie, Priscilla, Britney Spears… The “Lolita phenomenon” keeps growing, really ingrained in our society. These baby
women can be seen everywhere: on TV, in magazines, films, etc… My series “Little Dolls” questions
this phenomenon.
This work has been inspired by a photography of a little girl, taken for an advertising campaign of the
multinational company Mc Donald, an apostle of the standardization of the way of life. This little
blond head for magazines, as sterilized as the cake in front of her, was being offered a Barbie doll in
the end of the shooting. This gave me the idea of hybridizing her face with the one of the toy. A body
mutation operated by computer tools, in the same artistic line as Aziz and Cucher or Inez Van
Lamswerde. Creative works where one plays with pixels as a scientist does with genes, to recreate the
Man, the child here, at will.
The process is always the same: a little girl, a cake, a colourful background and the parents. Then the
transformation begins, thanks to a software retouching images. I apply a mask on the face of the little
girl and remodel the nose, polish the features and modify the carnation, change the colour of the eyes,
of the hair and recomb her. The background, position and proportions get standardized. This form of
digital plastic surgery erases the real, replaced by completely artificial image. However, despite the
lifting and relooking, I wanted to keep a certain idea of childhood. The hair can be somehow tangled,
the nails are not well-groomed, the clothes, the accessories remain and help producing an impression
of reality which leaves its identity to each image. This operative mode leads to a form of personalities
normalization.
The “Little Dolls” series is ambiguous. Neither family photography nor advertising imagery, the
representation oscillates between womanhood and childhood, fantasy and reality. The digital
technology subtly infiltrates the image, as the aesthetic codes of adults have impregnated the world of
childhood. The digital photographic creation that I present here with “Little Dolls” wants before all to
mirror our society, reflect the children’s dreams and their parents’ fantasies.
~~~Alain Delorme
Alain Delorme lives and works in Paris, France.
Alain Delorme
Little Dolls
Astenza, copyright © Alain Delorme
Emma © Alain Delorme
Anissa © Alain Delorme
Lilou © Alain Delorme
Hanna © Alain Delorme
Evencia © Alain Delorme
Sarah © Alain Delorme
Tara © Alain Delorme
Courtesy of the artist
Alain Delorme is represented by Magda Danysz Gallery
Also on the Huffington Post
What Alain Delorme is doing is very disconcerting to me and I think that's the point. It shouldn't seem all sweet and wonderful. Instead it feels twisted, and deceptive and therefore rather creepy.
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