The title carries a double meaning that the series inhabits entirely. In French, cliché is the word for a photographic negative — the inverted image from which prints are made. In English, a cliché is a tired convention, an image or idea so overused it has become invisible through familiarity. Numérique means digital.

The series takes as its subject one of photography's most persistent visual clichés: the anonymous female nude, headless or face-obscured, presented as an object of aesthetic contemplation in the long tradition of the fine art nude. The bodies here are digitally constructed composites of human subjects and doll joints — the manufactured, articulated structure of the object made visible within the body that the tradition has always treated as one. In each image, the doll joint at the point of articulation is not a disruption. It is a disclosure.

The making process is inseparable from the argument. The digital composites were first inverted in tone to create large-format negatives printed onto acetate. Silver bromide solution was then hand-painted onto sheets of watercolour paper to make them light-sensitive, and contact prints were produced using a UV lightbox — the same fundamental process as the earliest photographs of the 1840s. The newest cliché, made by the oldest method. These works are not C-Type photographic prints. They are hand-coated silver bromide contact prints on watercolour paper — objects made by hand, in a process that leaves the mark of the body that made them visible in the irregular borders of every print.

Cliché Numérique stands somewhat apart from the other series in the Disguises body of work — more formally reflexive, more concerned with photography's own complicity in the conventions it has reproduced. Where My Luxuria, Pygmalion's Prize and iDolls examine the visual economies that have shaped the female body across different registers of culture, Cliché Numérique turns that examination onto the photographic medium itself: the cliché that photography both inherited and perpetuated, and the negative from which it has always been made.