Photoessay: Can A Mannequin Fly?
A mannequin stands in a store window, its expression listless, dressed in a designer saree; a wedding gown; lingerie; all the while it is a symbol of a perfect body, a perfect sense of fashion, an object of envy. It is however, an inanimate being, a lifeless thing that stands still as the world passes it by.
The very fact that a mannequin resembles a human being so uncannily tells us something about what the human mind seeks to project as ‘desirable’. We create dummies fashioned after our own images, yet they fail to depict us accurately.
Often one passes by a display window of a store where an attendant is busy ‘dressing up’ a mannequin. This is when a mannequin stands devoid of any clothing, often missing an arm or two and it becomes a pitiable, vulnerable thing, sans clothing, sans dignity, sans its ‘humanity’.
Are you a mannequin?
The Text accompanying the photoessay is by Manvi Gautam
Sagar Shiriskar is a photographer, filmmaker and cinematographer. Winner- Chance of a Lifetime, a documentary series produced and hosted by Ashok Amritraj, (Hyde Park Entertainment, Inc.), United Nations, Image Nation (Abu Dhabi), UCLA Burkle Centre & Variety Magazine, As part of the competition co-directed three short documentary films on the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). As a cinematographer, he has worked on a film called “Benegal’s New Cinema” on filmmaker Shyam Benegal. As a photographer, some of his work has been a part of a travelling exhibition in the UK called Our Stories by The Photographic Angle, an association linked to the Royal Photographic Society. His photographs have also been published in Great Travel Photography, published by Imagine books, and also used as a cover Image by Packt Publishers.