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What Remains: Dollhouse. The Wringer (2003)
DONNA BASSIN
pinhole photograph, archival pigment print
24H x 36W in (61H x 91.5W cm)
AP edition
$900
The Afterlife of Dolls began as play therapy after I assisted families at Ground Zero following 9/11. In my clinical consulting room, a Zero Image pinhole film camera became the fourth wall of a dollhouse. The pinhole remained open for 45 minutes, the duration of a psychotherapy session. Between sessions, miniature figures and furniture were rearranged to reflect both my experience and what I witnessed in patients struggling with the aftermath of 9/11. The pinhole camera was essential to this process. With no lens and few controls, I had to relinquish the control I was accustomed to as a photographer. Long exposures produced distortions, soft focus, and unexpected shifts in scale and perspective. I could construct a scene but never fully anticipate the resulting image, a surrender to uncertainty and to where grief might lead. Play allowed what could not yet be known or spoken to emerge through the unexpected, offering a way to begin reassembling ourselves after collective trauma without denying what had been broken.
For What Remains, five photographs from the original series accompany a wooden dollhouse. A cut through one wall creates a visible wound, sutured with wire rather than concealed. Small photographs from The Afterlife of Dolls fill its rooms, “framed” by slices of photographed walls from vintage metal dollhouses, suggesting that memory itself is constructed from remnants rather than recovered intact. Returning to this work more than twenty years later, I understand it differently: mourning requires acknowledging what has been damaged or lost before repair can begin.
pinhole photograph, archival pigment print
24H x 36W in (61H x 91.5W cm)
AP edition
$900
The Afterlife of Dolls began as play therapy after I assisted families at Ground Zero following 9/11. In my clinical consulting room, a Zero Image pinhole film camera became the fourth wall of a dollhouse. The pinhole remained open for 45 minutes, the duration of a psychotherapy session. Between sessions, miniature figures and furniture were rearranged to reflect both my experience and what I witnessed in patients struggling with the aftermath of 9/11. The pinhole camera was essential to this process. With no lens and few controls, I had to relinquish the control I was accustomed to as a photographer. Long exposures produced distortions, soft focus, and unexpected shifts in scale and perspective. I could construct a scene but never fully anticipate the resulting image, a surrender to uncertainty and to where grief might lead. Play allowed what could not yet be known or spoken to emerge through the unexpected, offering a way to begin reassembling ourselves after collective trauma without denying what had been broken.
For What Remains, five photographs from the original series accompany a wooden dollhouse. A cut through one wall creates a visible wound, sutured with wire rather than concealed. Small photographs from The Afterlife of Dolls fill its rooms, “framed” by slices of photographed walls from vintage metal dollhouses, suggesting that memory itself is constructed from remnants rather than recovered intact. Returning to this work more than twenty years later, I understand it differently: mourning requires acknowledging what has been damaged or lost before repair can begin.
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