Eye Candy (7)

By: Peggy Nelson
October 7, 2011

It’s Friday, time for a HiLo field trip. Let’s visit the mannequin factory!

Things have gotten a lot more streamlined since the days the first prototype was assembled in the family garage.


[Frankenstein, dir. James Whale, 1931]

In his series Mannequin Workers, photographer Dylan Collard offers us a look at the inside of the modern mockup assembly line.

Not made of too-realistic baked goods, like last time, these mannequins are composed of proper… well, they are properly composed. Unlike the other last time.

The mannequins are mostly in perfect pieces, micro-voguing in modularity. Their makers, by contrast, pose artlessly, in smocks and facemasks; and yet are all the more compelling for that. Despite all our streamlined surfaces and algorithmic edges, we are actually drawn, not to vector, but to anomaly.

In their paint-spattered imperfections, the workers pictured here are, as Chekhov might say, “…so beautiful, so real.”


[Walter Koenig as Chekov in Spectre of the Gun, Star Trek TV series, aired Oct. 25, 1968]

***

Photo series by Dylan Collard: Mannequin Workers.

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Kudos, Most Visited, Uncanny