Kathryn Smith
R1,821.00
A limited-edition artist’s book that draws back the veil on the world and work of forensic artists and identification specialists, via first-person narratives gathered from eighteen active practitioners around the globe.
How did they get involved in this work? What cases have stuck with them? How do they balance the emotional toll of producing images that are considered the last chance to generate leads in high-stakes cases, namely identifying the missing, the fugitive and the unknown dead? What makes a successful facial depiction? How has doing this work changed their perceptions of life, death and personal safety?
In stock
Speaking Likeness (limited edition)
Speaking Likeness offers the first cross-cultural perspective on a vocation that generates significant public interest, yet remains poorly understood, under-resourced, but increasingly necessary as irregular migration and global conflicts increase in relation to economic inequalities and climate change, and more and more people are unidentified in death, or go missing. It shares the experiences of eighteen practicing forensic art and imaging specialists from around the world as a series of narrative portraits.
Originally designed as a piece of ‘forensic theatre’ for the public forum of the internet, iand now a book and an edition of portraits. The portraits, captured on video by the sitter alone in a room – thus eliminating the photographer-subject dynamic – attempt to capture the sitter’s gaze turning inwards. Online, they can be watched as durational portraits. In the book, two seemingly identical images but actually documenting two different moments in time, function as visual parentheses which hold each person’s narrative organised according to the same thematic pathways as the web version.
The title of the work is an intentional reference to Alphonse Bertillon’s nineteenth century biometric system of human identification called the ‘portrait parlé’ (trans. ‘speaking likeness’ or ‘talking portrait’) which set the protocol for the modern mugshot. It also puts itself in visual conversation with American photographer Arne Svenson’s project Unspeaking Likeness (2016, Twin Palms Press), where Svenson photographed forensic reconstructions as if the sculptures are living people sitting for their portraits. Theoretically, the work sets Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of ‘face of the other’ against Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s provocative conception of facial images as ‘abstract machines of faciality’, to ask questions about how we think about personhood and recognition via the facial image.
