Photoshop wizard Cristian Girotto‘s photo series L’Enfant Extérieur (the outer child) takes his subjects’ inner children and brings them, quite literally, to the surface. In the series, Girotto explores what adults would look like if men and women never left the cuteness of infancy — at least in some respects. Each photo, originally captured by photographer Quentin Curtat, shows the subject ‘shopped to look like a toddler.



The resulting images are cute with a big dash of creepy:

L’Enfant Extérieur can be taken several ways: from a fun experiment in Photoshop to an exploration of the “nature of purity and the unavoidability of corruption.” But whatever your deeper meaning, at its core, the series helps us envision a different kind of world. As Michele Panella writes in the description on Girotto’s website:

L’ Enfant Extérieur … show[s] us a world of men in the shape of children, as if the body could slip on the ugliness of life, less expected to imagine big fawn’s eyes winking in the night clubs or little chubby hands shaking in the offices.

You can find more of Girotto’s work over on his website.

L’Enfant Extérieur by Cristian Girotto (via Mashable)

Photo credits: Images by Cristian Girotto