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I’m honored and ecstatic to announce that one of my doll photos has been accepted to the juried artists’ portion of the 2024 Seattle Erotic Art Festival.
“The Faun, the Unicorn, and the Nymph” will be on display at the festival. The limited edition, color print on metal is 16″ high by 24″ wide and 1.25″ deep. It comes with a wireframe hanger in the back.
This photograph is part of a sequence from The Faun, the Unicorn, and the Nymph series, taken as an homage to the homoerotic fine artist Marc Debauch, whose work will also be displayed at the festival.
Debauch’s paintings are the ultimate in the realm of homoerotica. His body of work is not just sexy and fearless, it’s also sexy because it’s fearless. So, for his birthday in 2023, I made a tribute that’s an amalgam of his portfolio, hoping I could achieve a modicum of his fearlessness.
I’ve always been inspired by fantasy, whether it’s JRR Tolkien and HC Andersen, UK Le Guin and HP Lovecraft, Pierre et Gilles and Boris Vallejo, or Cartoon Saloon and Studio Laika. In my real, professional life as a photographer of both human models and commercial products, I always want to infuse fairy tales and mythical creatures whenever possible.
My fascination with sixth-scale figures (approximately twelve inches tall) began when I was six. I successfully lobbied my mom to buy me a Barbie. If I were a girl, she’d probably buy me one in a heartbeat. But I’m not, so it took a little bit of an effort.
Although my first Barbie wasn’t Barbie (it was Midge the ginger), I still loved her, even with the non-articulated elbows and the click knees with a very limited range of motion. Having Midge also launched my interest in sewing, and I asked my mom to teach me how to use her vintage Singer.
So there I was: a young, naive, but already super femme gay kid in Jakarta, Indonesia, making (ugly) clothes for poor Midge. While the other boys in my class were talking about Mario Bros or Superman, I was busy trying to make a Wonder Woman costume for my doll.
Some decades later and nine thousand miles farther, Midge was long gone and I’d accepted that I’d never be able to draw well and satisfy my yearning to produce smutty illustrations like my heroes Dom Orejudos (aka Stephen aka Etienne), Ishihara Tōru, Tagame Gengoroh, Tom of Finland, Rex, or Debauch.
So, I returned to dolls. And my, have these dolls come a long way.
I purchased my first seamless masculine-presenting sixth-scale figure in 2015. This figure, produced by a company called Phicen, was the first of its seamless kind to feature male genital attachments. It comes without a head but with several interchangeable hand attachments and a pair of detachable feet along with three genitals. (The later Phicen masculine-presenting figures come with only two, albeit bigger, attachments.)
Underneath the medical-grade silicone skin is a stainless steel skeleton with pegs that are compatible with most action figures from already-established brands like Hot Toys.
This is where the heads (as well as some clothing pieces and accessories) come from.
Chrissy, the main character in the Dollsexposed realm, is an original Hot Toys Chris Redfield action figure from the Resident Evil video game. However, with an X-acto knife, acrylic yarn, paint, and hot glue, I turned the hyper-masculine Chris Redfield into Chrissy, a pink-haired sissy slut with a below-average dick.
Other characters in the Dollsexposed world come from movies, video games, and the imagination of action figure producers.
The piece that was accepted into the 2024 Seattle Erotic Art Festival is one of my favorite works because it combines my love of fantasy, set design, costume and jewelry design, and smut.
Although building and lighting a diorama is arguably cheaper than making life-sized sets, it also has challenges such as finding doll-sized shrubberies and flowers. Creating doll-sized costumes also requires a lot of patience and attention to detail. When capturing an object that’s only twelve inches tall, a stray thread, a rip, or a missing bead is more noticeable since the photo or video results are magnified due to the scale. Plus, a Phicen doll’s silicone skin is like a magnet to lint and dust.
The jewelry pieces and accessories for the Faun, the Unicorn, and the Nymph, were hand-crafted by me.
The unicorn horn on the white stallion (an articulated, almost seamless sixth-scale horse by Inflames Toys) was made with apoxie sculpt and spray-painted gold. To not damage the figure, magnets were used to affix the horn to the head.
The Faun is played by Derek, a supporting character in Dollsexposed. His head came from a company called DamToys. The faux fur tights have a slit on the front for the penis. The flute was made of a recycled cotton bud stick and a coffee stirrer. The horns are air-dry clay that was molded directly on Derek’s head. Once dry, they attached without glue and could be taken off without staining.
Making the fairy costume for Chrissy, the Nymph, was literally a fantasy come true. The flowers were taken from artificial baby’s breaths, strung with tiny glass beads. The chiffon cloth is wired so it’s posable.
Doll photographers are a niche, but thriving community. Some of us are in it purely for the beauty and the fashion, preferring to admire the dolls in their original boxes. Some of us take them out and buy clothes, shoes, cars, and houses for our dolls, vicariously “living” through them.
Some, unsatisfied with how the dolls come out of big producers like Mattel, erase the factory-painted face and draw their own, or even create their own dolls using clay or porcelain or 3D printing technology.
Some of us create stories for our dolls, complete with emotional baggage and moments of triumph.
And then there are some of us who take doll photography into the realm of doll pornography by putting our dolls in multiple sexual situations, with varying levels of legality (depending on the location).
I’m proud to represent the doll photographers and the doll pornographers at the 2024 Seattle Erotic Art Festival.
Read more about Dollsexposed at the Seattle Erotic Art Festival 2024:
Dollsexposed showcases queer erotica, kink, fetish, and activism through twelve-inch doll photography. Their adventures in the doll world began in 2011 before establishing a home on dollsexposed.com eleven years later.
Their work has been displayed at Seattle Erotic Art Festival and Los Angeles Leather Getaway.