タヴィ・ゲヴィンソンのインスタグラム(tavitulle) - 2月26日 03時47分

1-3 by Elena Dorfman, from her “Still Lovers” series featuring people who live with Real Dolls, or "love dolls." 4-6 by Jamie Diamond, of people who live with Reborn dolls. Some of 42 portraits I saw last week, on display at the @fondazioneprada Milan Osservatorio. It made me think of Elif Batuman's article "Japan's Rent-a-Family Industry," about people who rent actors to play their relatives, and the value of carving out a space for emotional transference. I also thought of this part from Rainer Maria Rilke's essay on dolls:
"The simplest loving relationship was beyond our conception. With people who were something it was impossible for us to live and interact, the most we could do was merge into them, lose ourselves in them. But with the doll we had to assert ourselves, because if we surrendered to it there was nobody there. It made no response, so we got into the habit of doing things for it, splitting our own slowly expanding nature into opposing parts and to some extent using the doll to establish distance between ourselves and the amorphous world pouring into us."
For years I have returned to this passage because I think it articulates many traditional social contracts between real people, and how rarely these agreements make room for each participant's humanity. Every home is upheld by the narrative a family creates about itself. Every relationship is a storytelling collaboration, which is why it can feel so catastrophic when one person goes off-script, or does something out of character.
In a relationship with a doll, the owner is the sole narrator. All the expectations one learns to put on a loved one, all the fantasies one projects, can be channeled into a clear outlet. Maybe this relationship establishes distance with the world, or maybe it makes more room for real life to take place. With the fulfillment of emotional need can come a readiness for life's arbitrary nature.
Elena and I talked a bit about the relationships she built with the doll owners. She said that she wanted to photograph them because she related to them, not because she saw them as oddities.

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• dorfmanelena
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