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Borland, Polly (Photographer); Holborn, Mark (Editor) & Sontag, Susan (Contributor).
THE BABIES.
New York City, NY: PowerHouse Books, 2001. Hardcover. First Edition/First Printing. Unpaginated. As New. The photographer's breakthrough collection on fetish-subject. One of the most important and most fascinating photographic projects of the new century. A brilliant production by Polly Borland and Martin Murray Sorrell: Oversize-volume format in square shape. Pictorial hard boards with titles on cover and spine, as issued. Photographs by Polly Borland. Edited with an Introduction by Mark Holborn. Essay, "Borland's Babies", by Susan Sontag. The latter piece has not appeared in any other form and offers an approach to, not explains away, Borland's unusual project. Afterword, List of Plates, and Acknowledgments appended at the end. Printed on thick coated stock paper by Artegrafica in Verona, Italy to the highest standards. Without DJ, as issued. Presents the photographer's unforgettable series of images of grownup men who suffer from the much-maligned fetish called infantilism. Most of them are Australian, but there are a number of American, British, and French men as well. As sexual fetishes go, it is hard to think of something more puzzling, more rare, and in many ways, more disturbing than the adult wish to revert to babyhood. The subjects are not models but real sufferers, people whom the immensely talented documentary photographer patiently and sympathetically followed over many years. She explores the little-understood world of infantilism, artfully framing the inner lives of "adult babies" alongside their outer manifestations. Many of these men, who function normally in society as truck drivers, accountants, investment bankers, businessmen, and teachers, perhaps suffered as children and were left obsessed with the warmth and care experienced by infants and toddlers. Then again, maybe not, and this is just convenient psychological reductionism (as Diane Arbus contemptuously dismissed the normative interpretations of her own work on the "outsider" worlds of freaks and the insane). They dress up in adult-sized baby clothes, powder their bottoms, drink mother's milk (from baby bottles and surrogate mothers' breasts), and "play" with themselves and each other. Why? To re-create a lost attachment and more urgent, to get sexually aroused. In cinema, there is one great film about the inexplicable wish to revert to babyhood, taken to its farthest limits, that is, by going back to the insular comfort of a mother's womb: Marco Ferreri's "Tales of Ordinary Madness", based on the ironically titled collection of stories by the cult writer Charles Bukowski. In its single most distressing (and almost unwatchable) sequence, the male protagonist repeatedly tries, with his sexual partner's full consent, to insert his adult head inside the woman's vagina until she can no longer take it and screams in pain. "It won't work, would it?", the Bukowski character dejectedly says, genuinely frustrated, as if it were possible in the first place. Polly Borland's pictures are more watchable yet no less powerful. Her achievement is to make her subjects a felt presence: They pull us in and make us unwitting, sympathetic accomplices rather than mere observers. The only photographic collection of its kind, this is a one-of-a-kind experience. This copy is very boldly and beautifully signed in black marker on the title page by Polly Borland. Based in Australia, Borland signed very few copies for the publisher only, which promptly sold out. This is the only signed copy still available online and has no flaws, a pristine beauty. A rare signed copy thus. 95 color plates. One of the most brilliant living photographers. A flawless collectible copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER SUSAN SONTAG TITLES IN OUR CATALOG). ISBN 1576870839. $200.00 |
