Elena Dorfman met men and women in the United States and Europe who chose for various reasons to take these dolls into their everyday domestic life. Generally characterized by an atmosphere of calm serenity and the total absence of any moral stance or prejudice, the images investigate the emotional bonds that are created between the dolls and the people that bought them.
As a toy, a doll constitutes a personified object that plays an active role in a child’s imagination. With their human features and size, these RealDolls represent something similar in the adult world. Dorfman does not in fact focus on their function as pure sexual objects but rather on their role as plausible partners involved in all the moments of everyday life, such as the family breakfast or an evening spent watching television. The images thus document the life of the people and their private sphere. They present situations, aspirations and desires of which the dolls have become projections, accomplices or companions, thereby taking on an aspect of reality that goes beyond the dimension of sexual fantasy.
Dorfman uses photography as a medium to present the results of what could be described as a sociological study. She adopts a documentary photographic vocabulary to investigate the relationship between reality and fiction in the lives of people whose everyday routine is based on something evidently artificial but proves ultimately spontaneous nevertheless. Like other artists featured in this exhibition, Elena Dorfman investigates the capacity of photography to represent or manipulate reality. Both the photograph and reality thus become constructions specifically developed by the viewer out of a variety of components.

Elena Dorfman (USA, 1965)

Elena Dorfman is interested in social niche phenomena in which the definitions of reality and fiction tend to blur and overlap. The photographs of her series Still Lovers portray intimate and apparently common moments of private life that involve unusual relationships of love, friendship or simple cohabitation between human beings and dolls. The leading role in the images is in fact played by RealDolls, expensive and extremely realistic sex objects available on the Internet. Buyers can choose from a whole range of options to customize their dolls in accordance with their preferences.