THE GUY WITH 11,000 PHOTOS OF MANNEQUINS

In 2005, back when only 17 people had Flickr accounts, I somehow stumbled across a page with 3,000 photos of mannequins in various stages of undress. As you might expect, the photos were a little “on the creepy side.”

This past weekend, after attending an Ayahuasca ceremony at a Real Doll factory, I got to wondering: “Whatever happened to that serial killer mannequin freak from Flickr?”

A search for “mannequins” these days, however, turns up nothing more than distressed shots of dismembered arms taken by art-school students. To find the link, I ended up digging through a drawer of hard-drive backup CDs from early-to-mid 2000 and opening a PDF backup of my 2005 Livejournal account. Yes! After an hour of sifting through bad poetry and references to men I never should have dated, I found him once more. Lars and the Raped Girl.

Imagine my utter glee when I saw that his Flickr account is still active and this guy has continually been uploading photos of mannequins for the past seven years! Then, imagine my abject horror when I realized—holy shit—this Flickr account is still active and this guy has continually been uploading photos of mannequins for the past seven years!

He’s now up to almost 11,000 individual images of mannequins, organized into 128 individual sets. Of mannequins.Only mannequins. There isn’t a single human being to be found among any one of the images, except for this one blurry wedding photo watching as a fiberglass Anne Bancroft acts out scenes from The Graduate.

(I may or may not have embellished that image.)

Continue to Street Carnage to read the rest of this essay and see many more mannequins...