The Automaton, By Paolo Ventura

The New York-based, Italian-born artist-photographer Paolo Ventura works by building and then photographing his own extraordinarily detailed models and dioramas; whole miniature worlds have a strange, half-remembered or dream-like quality.

His latest work, The Automaton, is a photographic narrative based on a story that he was told as a child. It is a sad tale, haunted by historical tragedy, about a watchmaker, left, who builds himself a clockwork boy to keep him company in the eerily empty Jewish ghetto in Venice in 1943