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. Through her photographs, Joanna Kane has taken her 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 men and women - many of whom lived before the invention of photography.
