Joanna Kanes ''The Somnambulists’ is a series of photographic digital prints based on photographs of early nineteenth century phrenological casts. The images are large format monochrome digital photographs with subtle digital adjustments which suggest an illusory sense of the original living subject of the cast.
The project is called ‘The Somnambulists’, with reference to mesmerism, current at the time that many of the casts originate from, as the resulting portraits appear to exist in an ambiguous suspended state between life, death and sleep.
The images are created using layered digital techniques which are essentially photographic in nature to produce the illusion of skin, while still retaining the details and marks from the original plaster surface. The geezer in the middle is William Blake, especially strange as his cast would pre-date photography, so you get a glimpse as to what he may have actually looked like.
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