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Somnambulists : Photographic Portraits from Before Photography, Hardcover by ... - Picture 1 of 1

The Somnambulists by Roberta McGrath, Duncan Forbes, Joanna Kane (Hardcover, 2008)

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Somnambulists : Photographic Portraits from Before Photography, Hardcover by Kane, Joanna (PHT); Forbes, Duncan (CON); McGrath, Roberta (CON), ISBN 1904587569, ISBN-13 9781904587569, Brand New, Free P&P in the UK The Somnambulists are contemporary portraits of life and death masks from the cast collection of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society. Linked to the early nineteenth-century science of phrenology, these casts preserve quasi-photographic likenesses of individuals living 150 to 200 years ago - from unknown men and women to writers and artists such as Wordsworth, Keats and Blake. Releasing her subjects from the categories of the phrenological head collection, Joanna Kane magically renders photographic likenesses from before the age of photography.

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The life or death mask is in many ways the sculptural analogue of the photographic portrait. Both suggest direct traces from life, involve positive and negative, and evoke a mysterious connection between a living, breathing subject and a captured image. The drive to capture true likenesses in the early 19th century was partly generated by the pseudo- science of phrenology. As a by-product of this, cast collections such as those of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society, have preserved haunting likenesses via life and death masks from individuals living 150 to over 200 years ago.Through her photographs Joanna Kane has taken these subjects out of the categories and hierarchies of their phrenological context. They no longer appear as disembodied scientific specimens, but as photographically embodied portraits of individual men and women - many of whom lived before the invention or popular use of photography. The title, The Somnambulists , is a reference to mesmerism and phreno-mesmerism, which were current at the time from which many of the casts originate from. The resulting portraits appear to exist in an ambiguous suspended state between life, death and sleep.