Photographer Clayton Anderson is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘Anthropomorphia’. To see Clayton’s body of work, click on any image.

The strangeness of inanimate, anthropomorphic objects has always fascinated me. What is this thing, and what is it trying to tell me? It occurred to me that humans somewhere created these objects, and so true human feelings must have come into play as it became a finished, physical thing. My intent with these images is to capture a range of human emotions, explicit or implicit, in found anthropomorphic objects. I started this project at the outset of the stay-at-home, social distancing orders in 2020. People, my usual photographic subjects, were off-limits. I longed to continue photographing something human and expressive, even in isolation. I collected these items from online antique shops and auction websites. They range from factory produced to one of a kind and handmade. All were sent to me during lockdown at the height of the first wave of Covid-19 in the US. I consider these images portraits and composed them in various situations to imply a possible story. In this work I posed a question: “If these objects were truly alive, what would their lives be like?”