Photo stories
Speaks to a Sony World Photography Awards nalist exploring the worldwide phenomenon of ‘reborns’
It’s always an exciting time when the Sony World Photography Awards shortlist and nalist series are announced. As usual, looking through the 90-plus sets of images, many are done well and many I would like to have done. The reportage, Baby Boom, by nalist in the documentary category, Didier Bizet, is both. The babies in Didier’s images won’t babble, dribble or cry. They won’t need new clothes, throw up or dirty their nappies. They won’t grow into teenagers or grow old. They are hyper-realistic dolls that resemble a newborn baby, known in the industry as reborns.
Reborns appeared in the United States in the 1990s. The phenomenon is now worldwide. There are collectors, enthusiasts, workshops, books, competitions, stores, Expos, Facebook forums and YouTube channels where you can tune in to over 90,000 videos of reborn dolls. A Google search for ‘reborn doll’ returns 37,500,000 results, #reborn on Instagram has more than a million hits. It also has industry celebrities, mainly the artists that bring the reborns ‘to life.’ There are some 20,000 worldwide. The reborns arrive as kits of unpainted vinyl or silicone body parts: arms, legs, a head and soft body. The artist can spend days, or weeks, painstakingly applying layers of paint, sometimes as many as 30 before they are baked set. Eyes are added, clothes handstitched and (goat) hair implanted strand by strand. Advances in technology have allowed dolls to mimic breathing, a heartbeat and some mobility. Reborns can sell for hundreds, even thousands of pounds.
When Didier heard about reborns, he started reaching out on social media: ‘I understood that all these people are a bit afraid of journalists because usually when journalists talk about reborns, it’s in the same way, to criticise. At the beginning I was like everyone, this is crazy? When you have a very nice reborn in your arms you don’t really notice the difference, especially if the reborn is in silicon. It matches to your body, you feel very strange.’ With the help of friend and writer Charlotte Vannier, he found it much easier to contact and talk to those in the industry, most of whom are women. The reportage began in April 2019 in Valencia, Spain, which hosts the biggest doll show in Europe. Trips to London, Ukraine, Moscow and around his native France followed.
Reborns are sometimes a replacement for mothers who can’t produce children but they have a wider, often therapeutic, use outside the collecting community. Some artists make reborns for use in cinema, overcoming age and working restrictions. Some are used in education to train students in childcare skills. Reborns have helped ease grief for parents of stillborns. Didier photographed 50-year-old Amanda in London with her reborn, AJ (Albert Joseph), which helps her cope with her lifelong depression – at night they sleep in the same bed. In another photograph, an elderly resident of a care home cradles a reborn; studies have shown they can signi cantly bene t people living with Alzheimer’s disease.
Scenes that are not quite right
The photographs are taken on a Nikon D750 with 35mm lens. The light is natural and soothing. They are pictures you have to look at closely and then even closer. They are ordinary scenes but not quite right. In one image, a reborn lies face down at the top of some stairs, the visual anxiety only alleviated by the USB recharge cable plugged into the wall. The smiling head of one reborn with bright blue eyes, lies on the lap of Russian artist Galina Lobashova, as she applies nal touches. A toddler sits doll-like next to a lifelike toddler doll in one of the exhibition booths at the Spanish show. Unblinking eyes and eyes-shut reborns are laid out in the rst physical reborn store in Madrid, opened by Maria Valle Escudero. She sells her own reborn dolls alongside accessories, clothes and kits.
Didier hopes to continue the reportage exploring the reborn shows and community across America. The movement can be easy to criticise, those involved as freaky and the fascination with hyper-real dolls, morbid. Society increasingly demands perfection and heightened reality from prosthesis to video games to sex dolls. Why shouldn’t that apply to reborns? Didier’s photographs are a vital part of helping understand why.