These photos explore the uncanny world of love dolls

“The lips don’t move, so it basically feels like kissing someone dead,” Paris-based photographer Sofiya Loriashvili tells me, as I ask about the double-page spread in SUB #4 (published by Fisheye) in which she’s shown kissing an unresponsive, life-size sex doll sporting an unrealistically shiny brunette bob.

Taken from Only You and Me, an ongoing project that began in 2022, Loriashvili documents her encounters with these flawless yet lifeless plastic humanoids. “It’s as different as having sex with a sex toy compared to a real person,” she says, acknowledging that a kiss is the least interesting thing the dolls have to offer. “I was always afraid of hurting or damaging them.” At a glance, Loriashvili’s selfies with the love dolls look like a couple of girlfriends hanging out. But flicking through the rest of the book’s 96 pages, where she poses nude alongside them or sits among them, feels far more uncanny.

Discovering her love for photography as a teenager, Loriashvili began by shooting her friends and the nightlife around her, before struggling with addiction and entering rehab on multiple occasions. “Each time, my mother brought me a camera so I could occupy my days,” she recalls. “After my last rehab, I needed structure and something to focus my time on, so I decided to start studying,” she says, which led to her enrolling in photography school.

Understanding her role as both participant and observer, this body of work traces Loriashvili’s internship at a strip club, which resulted in Stripper Edition, a candid series of locker-room snapshots, and a paper titled How Stripping Helped Me Become a Better Photographer for her second year at GOBELINS. “Being a woman is already enough to understand what it feels like to be objectified,” she explains, reflecting on how the experience later helped her empathise with the dolls. “Being a stripper means taking advantage of that objectification, and working with dolls helped me intellectualise it.”

“My work revolves around eroticism and sexuality, so exploring this specific attraction [to sex dolls] felt obvious,” she continues, explaining that her use of fetish and obscenity is a way to depict the complexity of human emotion – not necessarily anything to do with the act of sex itself. ”During the day, I was meeting these dolls. At night, I was meeting these men. I started to notice how I was slowly turning into a doll: figuratively.” 

Loriashvili references the anthropologist Agnès Giard, who describes dolls as un désir d’humain –essentially, empty receptacles ready to receive their owner’s projections. “In the same way, as a dancer, I mirrored my clients in order to make a sale,” she admits. “I spent a lot of time thinking about what these men actually want, and just like with doll owners, there are as many desires as there are clients. But one thing kept coming back: the less I am, the better it works.”

Working with a strict vision of what each background should look like, the images only begin to cohere once a “beautiful and meaningful” location has been found. The dolls are then sourced from online forums. Opening with screenshots of love-doll Facebook accounts, the book closes with found internet images of their dismembered carcasses. “We imagined the book as a cycle,” Loriasvili explains. “From the creation of the doll to its death.” 

Posing them also proved to be a challenge; their clunky frames weighed around 50kg, and for obvious reasons, they remained unresponsive to verbal directions. “I noticed that many of the owners had created Facebook pages for their dolls,” she says. “To avoid looking like a strange woman randomly adding them, I changed my Facebook profile picture to an image of myself sitting with a doll.” It was a genius move as, from that point, doll accounts began sending her friend requests organically, almost daily.

“I haven’t met enough doll owners to have a complete overview, but I’d say it’s more about fetish than replacing women,” Loriashvili says, adding that it’s both easier and cheaper to hire a human sex worker. “A doll is heavy, difficult to move, cold, unresponsive, and needs to be cleaned afterwards.” She goes on to compare it to someone buying a pet fish for companionship: the need isn’t necessarily fulfilled – it’s simply a matter of preference and enjoyment.

Interestingly, physique design varies by region. While the market is now almost entirely dominated by Chinese companies, Loriashvili explains that there were previously major manufacturers in both Japan and the US. “Japanese dolls often looked as if they were on the verge of being alive: mouths slightly open and eyes staring into emptiness,” she describes. “American dolls, on the other hand, were much more overtly sexual, with teasing facial expressions, wide-open mouths, and exaggerated breasts.” Even the language changes across regions differed: “In Asia, they are often called ‘love dolls’, whereas in the West they are mostly referred to as ‘sex dolls’.” 

No matter how they’re referred to, whilst these dolls can offer some semblance of a sex act, would they ever create a future model to replace photographers? “It’s absolutely possible to create a human-like machine programmed to perform specific actions and take photographs,” Loriashvili considers. “The real question is: why would we want that?”

Only You and Me is now available for purchase at Fisheye Editions in France and Village Books for UK audiences