Greer Lankton’s dolls are more human than you think

The luminous trans artist Greer Lankton (1958 – 1996) was so ahead of the curve, it is only now, three decades after her death that her first monograph, Greer Lankton: Could It Be Love (Magic Hour Press) has been released. Edited by archivist and photographer Francis Schichtel, publisher and photographer Jordan Weitzman, and photographer Nan Goldin, the book brings together 100 photographs made by Lankton of her handcrafted dolls that took New York’s East Village by storm during the 1980s. 

Drawn from imagination and real life, Lankton crafted an extraordinary cast of characters that explore the magic, mystery, and madness of being femme in a man’s world. Here Coco Chanel, Candy Darling, Divine, and Teri Toye co-exist alongside Melvis the Fat Lady and Gail the Pinhead. ​“They’re all freaks,” Lankton is quoted as saying in the book. ​“Outsiders, untouchables. They’re like biographies, the kind of people you’d like to know about. Really interesting and fucked up. It’s what you want to read, the kind of people you stop and notice.” 

At once beautifully styled and agonisingly detailed, Lankton’s dolls – which she first began making as a child – live in the uncanny valley of memory. Beauty, pain, suffering, and desire can be felt in the most tender gestures, unnerving us with a sense of familiarity that belies the physical distress of their delicate yet tortuous designs. Drawing inspiration from German artist, Hans Bellmer, whose life-sized female dolls presented in tableaux vivants (living pictures) made him a target of the Nazi Party, Lankton embraced the grotesque as a powerful life force, staging scenes of the ​“dolls engrossed in glamour and self-abuse”. 

With the dolls, Lankton honoured ​“the vanity, the junkie, the anorexic” who live inside and among us. Hers was a truth few could survive, let along create from a place of honesty and empathic regard. In an artist’s statement written shortly before her untimely death from a drug overdose at the age of 38, Lankton revealed: ​“I’ve been in therapy since 18 months old, started drugs at 12 was diagnosed as schizophrenic at 19, started hormones the week after I quit Thorazine got my dick inverted at 21, kicked Heroin six years ago. Have been Anorexic since 19 and plan to continue and you know what I say FUCK Recovery, FUCK PSYCHIATRY Fuck it all because I’m over it. Over the roof. I’m so sick I’m dead, so from now on I take no responsibility for my actions. Oh and I was fucked up the ass by my grandfather since age 5, been brutally raped twice and have had almost every major organ in my body fail at some point.” 

Lankton channelled her trauma and experience into the work, the dolls becoming repositories of soul that beckon viewers into a strange and curious realm. She displayed them in the front window of Einstein’s, a local boutique that remained open until 1992, meeting passersby where they were, holding their gaze while daring them to look away. And she photographed them in situ, giving them life on the street and the beach, or in the house where they frolic and play. The dolls became avatars, not only of the characters they represent, but of the complexities of the human condition where beauty and brokenness co-exist in an endless spiral of remaking ourselves.

Greer Lankton: Could It Be Love is published by Magic Hour Press.

Miss Rosen is a freelance arts and photography writer, follow her on X.

Buy your copy of Huck 82 here.

Enjoyed this article? Follow Huck on Instagram and sign up to our newsletter for more from the cutting edge of sport, music and counterculture.

Support stories like this by becoming a member of Club Huck.