LOGAN YUHAS | DATE 11/7/2025

The first major monograph on Greer Lankton’s iconic, life-sized dolls

With voluminous hair and an adoring Eros around her neck, the mystique of Candy Darling is rendered in doll form in this enigmatic work by Greer Lankton (1958–1996). Darling is only one of many characters depicted in Greer Lankton: Could It Be Love, the first-ever monograph on this visionary trans artist and a thorough labor of love from publisher Magic Hour Press. Not only fabricated, but photographed, by Lankton herself, the images narrate her community’s fraught relationship with the body, their grotesque forms weaving together autobiographical narratives of disordered eating, depression, drug addiction and AIDS. With garish expressions, irreverent confidence and dark humor, the characters—both famous figures and original creations—tell a visual story of both Lankton’s own psyche and the 1980s East Village scene. Even among that illustrious circle, which included Peter Hujar, David Armstrong and Nan Goldin (who contributes an essay to this book), Lankton was a thrilling artist, who had obsessively perfected her dollmaking skills as an escape into others’ lives since childhood. Hilton Als puts it succinctly in his essay, describing, “her dolls’ attenuated limbs stretching this way and that, and those incredible faces, the manifestation of some dream of femaleness, usually, that reflected Greer’s own ideas about her own femaleness, a hard journey that didn’t make her any happier but gave her herself, a maker of females in her own emotional image.”