Alain Delorme's "Little Dolls"; A Contemplation of Children's Dreams and their Parents' Fantasies

The series Little Dolls questions the identity of the little girls who are playing with their looks as candidates of beauty contests. Through a pixel surgery as Alain Delorme puts it, he captures and changes the girls' looks and brings a sour criticism of how our society uses innocence.

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

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