Nape [continued]

With the book complete and submitted for marking the only remaining thing to do is exhibit the work. This project will be shown in the QFT as part of the QUB Film Studies '2010 End of Year Show' and will remain on the walls until late in the summer.

To promote the exhibition I had to design and distribute flyers to post around town. I opted to make two flyers, one picturing a nape from each sex, to ensure the exhibition was not misread before it was unveiled.

Installation was quick and painless. Now all the images need are viewers...

Somebody [Part V]: Nape

What can a nape reveal about a person?

The reductive processes of phrenology and physiognomy within social science and photography allowed Victorians to classify bodies based on visual details and firmly believed that a study of the exterior provided a revealing insight into someone’s character or nature.

As a result people, since the 1840s and 1850s, have been encouraged to read portraits using physiognomic information, which instigates the dangerous process of stereotyping. The 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.

By focusing on depersonalizing the nape, the back of the neck, rather than the face I have moved away from the historical and instilled methods of physiognomic documentation. The nape can be hidden with hair, bared, shaved, wrapped in clothes and even painted but when objectified can the borderland between body and brain also reveal insightful truths about a person’s nature?