May 2010

 

Artist Statement

 

The reductive processes of phrenology and physiognomy within social science and photography allowed Victorians to classify bodies based on visual details.  This stringent study of the exterior apparently provided a revealing insight into someone’s character.  Since then, physiognomic information has become the basis for reading portraiture beyond the pose or gesture.  This procedure of making an object, or informative landscape of the body created topological images that could be easily arranged into ‘types’.  This style of deadpan photography was suited to, and subsequently used by, the police force to measure the physiognomic criminal body against that of an ‘average’ person. 

 

More recently, artists have begun utilizing this method of photographing to explore how the contemporary photographic portrait is assimilated, the key example being Thomas Ruff’s (b.1958) prodigious rescaling of the passport image.  The passport format negates emotion and gesture forcing the viewer to scrutinize every highly detailed pore for personal information.  By adopting this depersonalizing format to present the nape, rather than the face, I have incorporated historical and contemporary methods to question how photographic interpretation relies on a dissection of details and the creation of visual trends.

 

What can a nape, the back of the neck, reveal about a person?  The nape can be hidden with hair, bared, shaved, wrapped in clothing, pierced and tattooed; but when objectified and reduced to physiognomic information can the borderland between body and brain also reveal insightful truths about a person’s nature?