The Uncanny Statuary
Portraits of these celebrity wax figures freak people out—and rightly so.
01About a year ago, Toronto residents began noticing a series of six-foot-high celebrity portraits on the sides of convenience stores around the city. There was Mike Tyson with his famous face tattoo; Zach Galifianakis in a T-shirt with a messenger bag slung casually over his shoulder. People were fascinated.
02Almost nobody guessed the truth about the images—that the portraits were actually of wax models from Madame Tussauds. Lusztyk had spent months shooting the images on site at the Madame Tussauds locations in Las Vegas and Washington, DC, where he photographed the figures against a white backdrop, as if they were in a studio.
03Lusztyk named the series "The Uncanny Valley Portraits"—a reference to the idea, derived from robotics, that human simulations stir up increasingly uneasy feelings as they approach a perfect likeness to actual people. "Once people realize what they’re looking at," he says, "there's this sort of revulsion."
04But the fact that many viewers don’t realize they’re looking at a wax simulacrum prompts other philosophical questions. How well do we actually know a celebrity like Mike Tyson, whose image we’ve seen countless times but whom we’ve probably never met?
05In his famous 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” German critic Walter Benjamin argued that reproducing an image "substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence"—which means that the "aura" of the original object or person dies hard (sorry).
06The photos reflect the exacting verisimilitude of each wax effigy: In 2012, Madame Tussauds designers went to Stephen Colbert's Comedy Central studio to take measurements for this one.
07Perhaps no one is more photographed today than President Trump, so when Lusztyk heard last year that the Washington, DC Madame Tussauds was debuting its Trump model, he knew he had to photograph it. "They created it after the inauguration, and it’s a really good one in my opinion, so I was really excited to include it in the series," he says. "The Obama one's not so great."
