Artist, Psychoanalyst and Filmmaker Donna Bassin is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the series ‘The Afterlife of Dolls’. To see Donna’s body of work, click on any image.

Over twenty years ago and soon after September 11, I created: The Afterlife of Dolls. This photographic series responded to my work as a crisis interventionist with first responders at Ground Zero and my psychotherapy patients’ anxiety, horror, and loss. I turned to my art practice to contain, represent and reflect upon the emotional states of myself and the people I was supporting.

In-between patients, I set up miniature worlds within a vintage dollhouse in my office. I placed a pinhole camera inside to capture the “play therapy” as I toyed with listening and respecting my artist self to help cope with the personal and community trauma. This out-of-control “collaboration” with the distortions of scale, light leaks, soft focus, wide-angle of vision, and infinite depth of field of the pinhole camera, without any controls besides exposure time and without a viewfinder for composition, evoked uncertainty regarding perception and memory.

For the next year, I moved the dollhouses and dolls out of my office and experimented with various locations and new characters. The resulting photographs provided a visual record of my work with my patients and my own, symbolically depicted through the dolls as we attempted to process the aftermath of September 11. The photographs, often unsettling, reflect dissociation and melancholy. Although I used a variety of doll figures to play and replay scenes, my central and reoccurring character resembles Laurie Simmons, a well-known photographer who, in the 1970s, used dolls to explore social concerns.