Isabella

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Peter Peryer has never been prolific, producing only a few photographs each year that he regards as successful. Isabella dates from a particularly productive period which followed Second nature, the first major survey of his works, which toured New Zealand, Australia and Germany during 1995–97.

So, who is Isabella? Or rather, what is Isabella? There are no secrets here: Peryer has stated that she is a teaching aid, a doll used by the medical profession to train nurses in giving babies injections. She was already named when he borrowed her for a day to take this photograph.

What captivated Peryer was the doll’s lifelike quality, which goes to the heart of a central preoccupation in his photography since the early 1980s. The question ‘Is it real or not?’ is one to which he keeps returning. The success of Isabella and other images like it is dependent on this very ambiguity. Whether his subjects are animate or inanimate, Peryer approaches them in the same way and gives them the same quality of attention. The technical devices he uses to heighten the ambiguous effects vary. Here, they include camera shake, which subtly renders the doll’s appearance less sharp, less certain. Scale is also toyed with, so it is not clear exactly how big she might be or where Peryer’s camera is in relation to her (a little too close for comfort, perhaps?).

These strategies have another intended consequence. There is something rather odd about Isabella. It comes not only from the confusion about whether she is real, but also from the strange disjunction between her plump, babyish body and adult-like face with full lips and half-lidded eyes. Peryer has commented that sometimes he photographs real things and makes them look like models. Isabella is proof of his equal commitment to the reverse.

Helen Ennis