Richard Dumas is not a portraitist but a photographer: a truth that is self-evident to those who look closely at his work published in the press (including in Libération) but that too often reduces the practice of the "looker" to the motif he declines. In his book Soft Machines, Dumas tackles the making of sex dolls. "Matt McMullen, the 33-year-old former hard-rocker, creator of the soft and supple Real Dolls (the Rolls Royce of the sex doll), claims to sculpt his dolls 'from the head' after his old readings of Playboy, a rather frightening notion when one sees him amid his X-rated ossuary and quarters of women hanging from their chains. His fixed butcher-surfer's eye is even colder than theirs. Reality, when one goes to see it at the workshop in San Marcos (southern California) where the dream dolls are made, is distinctly more bland. McMullen's wife dresses the dolls in trashy lingerie before sitting them in their wooden packing crates, a kind of portable toilets. The sister-in-law, an aspiring actress named Shelly Couture, handles the marketing, the sales and the babysitting." P.G.