In Laboratory Obsession, Massimiliano Camellini photographs the manufactured bodies of film and theatre—the automata, androids, monsters, and other figures built to simulate life. The subject is not special effects as spectacle alone, but the persistent human desire to assume the role of creator. From the myth of Prometheus to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein, the book places these artificial beings within a long cultural history of making life in one’s own image.

Camellini’s photographs attend to the moment when inert matter begins to appear animate. Human forms assembled from nonliving materials are presented as objects of fascination and unease, poised between construction and emergence. The images consequently address the artists and technicians behind them as much as the characters themselves: their experiments become reflections of obsession, emotion, and the wish to reproduce the “spectacle of life.” What remains in memory is the unstable passage from visible fabrication to apparent presence.

Published by 5 Continents Editions in 2010, the bilingual Italian-English volume contains 96 pages and 50 duotone illustrations. Its compact hardcover format, measuring 22 × 18 cm, suits a work whose force lies in sustained attention rather than scale. Contributions by Massimo Centini, Jonny Costantino, Mara Granzotto, and Georges Vercheval place the photographs within anthropological, critical, curatorial, and photographic contexts, while Camellini’s sequence gives the project its central visual argument.

For collectors, the book merits attention as a focused meditation on the boundary between image, object, and living form. It connects the histories of myth, literature, cinema, and theatre without reducing them to illustration, and turns the backstage materials of illusion into a subject in their own right. The result is a concise, conceptually coherent photobook about how invented bodies can reveal the desires of those who make—and look at—them.