Today I stumbled onto Oobject — a weird multiuser “curations collection” that exhibits photos that members spot online, organized by offbeat themes. One of the most uncanny exhibits of them all is a collection of “medical manikins”. The above shot by Tomer Ganihar (a shot taken as part of a series he did in an Israeli hospital in which detailed mannequins of men, women and children maimed by war and terror are used to train doctors and medics) is my favorite. This doll — head back, mouth agape, eyes askew, probed with wires and tubes — does not merely trigger an orthodox response of the “uncanny” because it is a doll that seems human, but more specifically, it looks like a dead or dying human, expressing suffering. Indeed, it appears to either be crying out for help or having expired doing so. The well-chosen angle of Ganihar‘s shot, the pose, and so forth drive the image of helplessness home. And the fact that it is actually an instrument used by doctors as a substitute for a living body makes it all the more disturbing, perhaps because it is as if the real world practice has “magically” caused the doll itself to suffer!
On a related note, here’s an uncanny photograph that my friend Bruce Siskawicz sent me awhile ago. It has haunted me for some time, and I have mused over what sort of odd person would collect such dolls or have them “mooning” out the window:
On Oobject, I discovered that those creepy “things” in the window are most likely infant manikins that the Red Cross uses to teach CPR! This knowledge does nothing to change my reaction to the image: it looks like they are trapped inside the window, darkly askew. The “twinning” of the dolls in a virtual shot-reverse shot symmetry only makes it more Unheimlich!
[Related link: Here you can see a funny gag from a German TV show that uses CPR dummies in uncanny ways.]
