Ron Gershman: The Secret Lives of Mannequins

Ron Gershman–The Secret Lives of Mannequins

Ron Gershman’s current project is a provocative photo essay that explores the
meaning of youthful beauty and sexuality as represented through the printed
media. Gershman was also trained as a psychiatrist, allowing him to draw on a
vast reservoir of understanding of the human psyche. In the Mannequin series,
his photos focus on the tension between our strivings for a personal identity
and the forces within us that compel us to social conformity. Reinforced by
the media, our perceptions of reality become distorted. Magazines play into
this unreality by digitally retouching the photos of models. Surrounded by
such images, our society has come to accept these artificial constructs as real
representations of people. The cost of this is often a pervasive cultural
dissatisfaction with our physical selves and our lives in general.

Gershman utilizes mannequins to explore the duality between reality and
fiction. We are programmed from birth to recognize human images. It is this
predisposition that creates the ease with which we categorize as real a two
dimensional image of something that has no real counterpart in experience.

Gershman writes captions to accompany the photos, attacking the dangerous
misconception that beautiful people live beautiful lives. His goal is not to
create an image indistinguishable from a real person, but to create doubt and
questioning in the viewer. Gershman is not trying to trick or fool anyone with
his manipulated photographs of mannequins, but hopes simply to stimulate
awareness of the forces that are so powerfully affecting all of our lives.