Reborns: dolls so lifelike you could mistake them for real infants

In the National Portrait Gallery in London at the start of this month, at the awards ceremony for the Taylor Wessing prize, a woman was standing with a tiny baby. That in itself was not unusual – there were probably three or four babies dotted around, and she was cradling it in the normal way, as if to support its head and not wake it. But it somehow didn't look right; it looked, in my peripheral vision, as if it wasn't moving enough. Anyway, while I Englishly darted looks at it without approaching, my friend did approach, and it wasn't real. Phew. Not ill, just inanimate.

It belonged to the photographer Rebecca Martinez, who had used it, and many others like it, for her project preTenders. And while I went over to look at it, and laughed, I felt resentful at being tricked. It had stirred some panic in me, something similar to that impotent distress you experience when you hear about a child being killed by an act of violence. Later, when telling me about the four years she has spent photographing people with these dolls, their collectors, their creators, her friends, a whole variety of subjects, Martinez said, "If I go out and I hold this doll in any way other than you would a real baby, people get mad. I cannot just hold it casually, like by one arm or whatever, because people will go, 'It's not right, you can't do that.' They go crazy. Even though the rational self knows it's a doll." But I'm with the mad people, because you don't start off knowing it's a doll; you start off thinking it's a baby. You can be disabused of your mistake but you can't, immediately, be disabused of your anger.    More