Gabrielle de Montmollin

I like to vary the focus of my postings, but I will spend a second day on photography, after going on about Atget yesterday, to mention the surrealistic black-and-white photographs of Gabrielle de Montmollin. She is, I think, Swiss by birth and is now based in Toronto, and she creates stories by posing children's dolls and other toys in her photographs. The disturbing photograph to the right is an untitled part of the series The Meticulous Construction of the Tranquil Life of Amazons, from the early 1990s, and made me think about a lot of things. In her most recent work, de Montmollin has experimented with making masks for the dolls in her photographs. There is also an interesting piece of Web-based art (Xylophone #3) that invites the user of her site to compose the photograph by clicking on a sort of map.

She doesn't list Atget among the artists she admires on her links page, but there are some similarities, although her work is much farther from the concept of documentation so important in Atget's career. She was also kind enough to link to Ionarts, which I appreciate very much.