Thursday, September 26, 2013

From a Doll Hospital in Florida

Have been on a little newspaper photo-archive binge this week: one outcome this classic B&W.  Is it possible to photograph doll parts without the result being a surrealist Atget/Max Ernst/Hans Bellmer cliché?   I don't know and I don't care.

Actually the bonus jackpot here is found on the photo back--a pasted-on clip of the article for which this was the illustration.  Teaching Lolita this week and I can't help but think that Nabokov must have invented the homicidal name of the Florida lady doll-doctor: Carmen Smotherman.   (I'm sure she was a lovely person but she does have a slightly criminal look to her.)  Charlotte Haze reincarnated, perhaps, and plotting how to take her long-postponed revenge on Humbert Humbert?