Ellyn Kail captions:
For Mother Love, New York-based photographer Jamie Diamond immerses herself within the subculture of Reborn dolls, true to life artificial babies crafted from materials like vinyl, doe suede, glass, and layer upon layer of paint.
The artist discovered the Reborn community while pursuing her self-portrait project I Promise to be a Good Mother, in which she used a doll to stand in for an imagined child. Behind these online collections of high end, expensive figures, she found a group of women hobbyists who worked from home studios. The process demands long-term commitment and passion, with each doll requiring dozens of paint coats and the careful insertion of each individual strand of hair into the scalp.
Most of these artists sell the dolls to other adult women collectors, who will often go on to play the role of its mother. The Reborn babies, Diamond explains, are crafted not only to resemble the real thing, but glass beads are also inserted into certain areas to mimic the physiology of living children, and they are frequently perfumed to smell like a newborn babe.
See more of Diamond’s work here.
The Dish 