By mixing portrayals of myth, historical fact and the media in illusionistic figures, wax museums collapse the distinctions between factual and fictional worlds. In the wax museum, all public figures, real or imagined, blur into a succession of idols. This confusion between person, public image and surrogate figure is not confined to the wax museum; it is a modus operandi of mass culture. The photographs of WORLD OF WAX illuminate and emphasize this lack of differentiation.

When I began my first wax museum series in 1983 in part as a response to the fictions of the Reagan years in the 1980s, I viewed the wax museum as a double of our culture, a stockpile of our values enacted by surrogate figures, a visible past. I began in part as an ethnographer and commentator, aiming to study and reevaluate embalmed fictions and myths. Skewed framing, filmic lighting, selective focus and reflected images from multiple tableaus were used to evoke psychological or ideological meanings divergent from the overt meaning of the display.

The wax figures provide me with an excellent means to explore the blurred relationship between illusion and reality and its effect on us in public and private realms. By revealing mythic aspects, which influence our collective imaginations, I hope the viewer will reconsider the surfaces which reveal underlying complexities of social interactions.

Even at their best, waxworks were never terribly convincing, rendering their subjects more as if embalmed than with the lifelike aura their makers intended. Revealing our preoccupations and obsessions, the photographs also capture something else for us: not only our own decline but also our fascination with the forceful refusal of death that photographs and waxworks share.

Susan Wides
New York 1988