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Joanna Kane - photographer
project funding 2007
I applied for funding from the Juliet Gomperts Trust while working on the photography series ‘The Somnambulists: Photographic Portraits from Before Photography’.
This is a series of digital photographic portraits based on photographs of phrenological life casts from the early nineteenth century. Casts of heads were created which, with the passage of time have preserved haunting quasi-photographic likenesses from individuals living 150 to 200 years ago. One of the aims of the project was to transform these museum artefacts from scientific specimens confined within the categories and hierarchies of the phrenological collection, into portraits of individual men, women and children.
The images are monochrome digital photographs with subtle digital adjustments which suggest an illusory sense of the living, breathing subject of the cast. A combined analogue/digital photographic process is used to create the suggestion of photographic portraits from life.
In April 2007 I was very fortunate to receive a grant of £1000 from the Gomperts Trust towards the production of exhibition prints for 2 exhibitions. This made a huge difference, both practically as it enabled me to proceed with the creation of the prints, and in terms of encouragement at a key stage of the project. The personal interest from the Gomperts Trust was also very much appreciated
The exhibition was shown at the Month of Photography in Bratislava, Slovakia, part of European Month of Photography in November 2007, where it was installed in a 14th century chapel. And at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, from January 22nd to April 6th 2008.
A larger series of images, with an essay, appears in the photography book, ‘The Somnambulists’, (Dewi Lewis Publishing, February 2008).
